Water is flowing back to Cameroon's Bénoué Valley — and rice farmer Tchikilabi Thomas can taste the difference

Tchikilabi Thomas has farmed near Cameroon's Bénoué River for almost 35 years, and for most of them the water arrived — or didn't — through open canals that lost an estimated 30 to 40% of their flow to seepage and evaporation under a 38-degree sun. The World Bank-backed VIVA Bénoué project is rebuilding that system: lined canals on one bank of the river, and on the other, buried pressurised concrete pipes — manufactured on site at Lagdo by Cameroonian operators, technicians and engineers trained for the job — that lose almost nothing on the way to the fields. A completed embankment now protects about 9,500 people from Bénoué floods. In the farmer field schools, Thomas and his neighbours tested new rice varieties themselves: 'Before the project, production was low. Now we have a very good rice variety that gives eight to nine tonnes a hectare. We tested and validated it ourselves.' Six water users' associations, 484 members strong — 119 of them women — are being trained to run the system long after the builders leave.

SDG 2 · Zero hunger — Mechanism: infrastructure build