THE MWEA-TEBERE RICE IRRIGATION SCHEME CENTRAL KENYA

The Mwea-Tebere rice irrigation project is a child of the Mwca Development Scheme which had been started to restore land which had been eroded and degraded as a result of overstocking. It is situated about 70 miles northeagt of Nairobi in KirinyagOl district of the Central Province of Kenya. on the dry
plains to the southeast of Mt. Kenya. Standing at about 3,500 feet the area
receives an average of about 30 inches of rain which is particularly unreliable;
thus there was 23 inches in 1960, 50 inches in 1963 and 29 inches in 1965. It )s
an area of impervious, heavy. black cotton soil which overlies a weathered
trachyte bed. The scheme had its birth in 1952, when experiments on irrigated
crops, notably rice and tobacco, were tried. Tobacco experiments failed and the
scheme is now known chiefly as a rice irrigation scheme. The constructional
works went ahead with unskilled and unwilling labour with no previous
experience of irrigation. But despite this, by 1960, most of the major building
works had been completed. The tenants, with landlessness as the only qualification, were drawn from the Mau Mau detainess many of whom happened to be Kikuyu from the ‘land-hungry’ districts of Kiambu, Murang’a and Nyeri. Rightly or wrongly agricultural skill was not tested as an essential qualification for
tenancy. In 1964, however, a new qualification was introduced that all the future
tenants would be drawn from Kirinyaga.

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