Improving groundwater management to enhance agriculture and farming livelihoods: Socio-economic assessment for improving groundwater management in the Left Bank Command of the Sukkur Barrage, Sindh Pakistan

Here we present two reports prepared under the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) funded LWR 2015/036 project “Improving groundwater management to enhance agriculture and farming livelihoods in Pakistan”. The project aimed to build the capacity of researchers, farmers, farming communities and relevant government and non-government agencies to improve groundwater management in ways that enhance farming family livelihoods in Pakistan. The project focussed focused on six case study sites: two each in the provinces of Balochistan, Sindh and Punjab, between 2016 and 2021.The overall approach of this project was ongoing collaborative inquiry, where the lessons from one activity guided the development of following activities. Whilst the project had a technical focus in relation to generating knowledge and building capacity in groundwater monitoring, the socio-economic aspects were equally important. The initial project plan relied on traditional econometric analysis of the socio-economic survey and the results of these surveys and analyses for the case study sites in Sindh Province are presented in the first report. However, as the project progressed, it became apparent that an additional participatory process would best suit the project’s capacity building aims. The Representative Agricultural Pathways (RAPs) approach enabled consideration of the socio-economic analysis, within the context of growing understanding of the groundwater situation in the case study sites. The RAPs study for Sindh, which builds on the social-economic analysis in the first report, is presented in the second report.