As night falls on a reclaimed agricultural field in New Nubariya, Egypt, the hum of electric pumps cuts through the darkness. Water users lay out drip lines and begin irrigating their plots.
“During the summer — our period of peak demand — we irrigate at night because that’s when water finally reaches us, after the company-owned farms upstream have taken their share,” explained Abdelwahab Elhadad, a senior representative of the Water User Association (WUA) in New Nubariya, seasoned by years of negotiation over access and rotation.
Scenes like this offer a window into how Egypt’s irrigation system truly operates — through adaptation, bargaining and informal coordination. Agricultural productivity is not simply crop-per-drop, but also waiting time, equity of distribution, rotational schedules and the social relations that make cooperation possible.
Yet from a satellite’s eye, these realities flatten into abstractions — withdrawals, depletions and efficiencies. The risk is a widening gap between the lived system and the modelled one, and between the policies designed at the national scale and the practices that shape livelihoods and food production on the ground.
A growing policy interest in Water Accounting+
To respond to the complexity of this system, Egypt is showing growing interest in Water accounting, particularly Water Accounting+ (WA+) as a framework for understanding national water balances.
The WA+ approach draws on satellite data, global databases and local measurements to indicate how water moves through a river basin, offering answers to how much water is available, where it flows, who uses it and to what value. Policymakers and engineers see in it a pathway to transparency, comparability and evidence-based water allocation.
But tools have limits.
Social scientists caution that water accounting can obscure politics, power, institutional fragmentation and lived realities. Irrigation is shaped by informal rules, irregular flows and local knowledge — including how to bend regulations to survive. Today in Egypt, a divide persists between those who generate and interpret data and those whose lives are governed by decisions derived from it. Water accounting, if owned only by experts, risks reinforcing inequality rather than improving governance.
Institutionalizing WA+ as a socially owned system
The International Water Management Institute (IWMI), supported by the CGIAR Policy Innovations Program, is working with Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation to bridge this divide between the people who use water every day and the officials who set water policy.
They aim to ground Water Accounting+ in social ownership, embedding it into ongoing relationships between data producers, decision-makers and water users. The goal is to make accounting a routine part of decision-making at all scales, with longer-term impacts on local and national development.
“Water accounting is not a technical agenda. It is a moral imperative. Science must go hand in hand with decision-makers and community action,” said the former Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation and President of the Arab Water Council, Hussein El-Atfy, sharing remarks at Cairo Water Week 2025. He stressed that Water User Associations representatives are co-managers of water and co-producers of data — a principle essential to validating WA+ outcomes and breaking down producer–user barriers.
“We don’t just want to ask for more water. We want to help manage it — when we receive it, when cultivation starts, and how new crop varieties are adopted. To increase production, we must integrate water and land innovations,” said New Nubariya WUA representative, Elhadad.
When data speaks with, not for, communities
The impact of WA+ is already visible in the region. In Morocco, a groundwater dashboard designed by IWMI and the IHE Delft Institute of Higher Education visualized WA+ results indicating that mismanaged irrigation by carrot farmers in Berrechid Plain accounted for about 25% of the aquifer’s water gap. Carrot farmers were continuing irrigation after maturity — not to increase yield, but to store crops in the soil due to a lack of refrigeration.
“The practice consumed eight million cubic meters of water annually — a quarter of the aquifer’s deficit,” said Ehssan Elmeknassi, a senior water and irrigation management specialist and researcher at the Agronomic and Veterinary Institute Hassan II, in Egypt.
Using this shared evidence, farmers, basin authorities and agencies negotiated a cold storage solution under an aquifer contract signed in 2021. Insights from WA+ became a negotiation tool that was socially owned by those involved, used in practice and ultimately influential in shaping development decisions.
When efficiency hides inequality
In Sudan’s Blue Nile plains, satellite-based water accounting revealed that privately run farms using pivot irrigation machines with large sprinklers were growing crops more efficiently than smaller farms run by local farmers nearby. However, the so-called “efficient” fields sat on land taken from evicted farmers, producing fodder for export while undermining food security.
The data was accurate, but incomplete.
The water accounting tool measured value per drop, while masking dispossession, inequity and lost livelihoods. In cases like this, efficiency without context becomes misrepresentation.
“Few water users can read and write, and even fewer are familiar with digital tools,” observed Elhadad. “If WA+ is to help us, it must be easy to access and understand.”
These experiences point to a reframing in which WA+ should evolve from a definitive representation into a shared space where users, scientists and policymakers interpret numbers and test alternatives together.
Bruce Lankford, an emeritus professor of water and irrigation policy at the University of East Anglia, UK makes a similar case in his paper “Irrigated agriculture: more than ‘big water’ and ‘accountants will [not] save the world.” He argues that accounting is not the only quantitative lens and should not crowd out field-based approaches rooted in work with water users.
But engagement only happens when data matters to people’s decisions, and ownership matters.
For example, water users are unlikely to engage with data unless it affects their irrigation schedules, costs, or returns. Without shared ownership, communities remain vulnerable even with advanced tools. In Egypt, the national federation of Water User Associations can help link national datasets to local realities. To enhance water users ownership of water data, dashboards should present information in accessible formats, using clear visuals and language that farmers and local officials can easily understand.
Toward a socially embedded water accounting approach that people can trust
Ultimately, institutionalizing water accounting in Egypt is not only about better quantified abstraction and measurement. At its core, WA+ favours shared interpretation over expert control and transparency over top-down directives. Water Accounting+ is about trust and joint responsibility over fragmented authority, and local canal-level ownership over distant decision-making.
WA+ becomes meaningful when it strengthens relationships as well as metrics — turning data into a common language for managing water more equitably and sustainably.
