Reliable Irrigation Water Access for Smallholder Farmers in Ghana: A Systematic Review

Reliable access to irrigation water from available sources is crucial for smallholder farmers in SubSaharan African countries, including Ghana. Such access is expected to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change on agricultural productivity and crop yield. Irrigation water access is supposed to foster economic and income growth. However, in Ghana, past studies have indicated that the mean annual temperature is expected to increase in the future. This rise in temperature is likely to lead to a significant reduction in crop yield and increased food insecurity. We argue that while smallholder farmers are eager to use irrigation on their fields, they lack a dependable source of water for irrigation. Water access is inconsistent, regardless of whether there is a source of water. Smallholder farmers face persistent challenges in accessing reliable irrigation water, largely due to inadequate capital investment in irrigation infrastructure and limited technical and financial support from the government. While these barriers are well acknowledged, there is limited empirical study focused on identifying why irrigation has underperformed in Ghana. Therefore, this paper investigates the reliability of irrigation water access for smallholder farmers in Ghana. In this paper, we used the PRISMA method to conduct a systematic literature review from November 2022 to June 2025. Our primary sources of information for this review were the electronic journal databases of JSTOR and Google Scholar. The inclusion criteria for our study were restricted to journal articles published in English from 2010 to 2024. Using keywords like “reliable water access,” “smallholder farmers,” “water sources,” and “irrigation,” we narrowed down our search and found 17,325 items. Of the 17,325 articles, the focus of 56 was on our objective, and the 56 articles were about Ghana. As a result, we found that Ghana has the potential to develop dependable irrigation schemes and implement reliable irrigation systems for agricultural production. However, there is insufficient irrigation in the agricultural sector, which is mostly rainfed. We discovered that inadequate and inconsistent water access caused low