Scoping, coordinating, and leveraging: a training program to manage projects over the long term.
Strengthening the management of hydro-agricultural development projects
Effective management of hydro-agricultural development projects relies on solid project owner skills: project scoping, process management, stakeholder coordination, and the ability to learn from experience. These skills are particularly critical for irrigation development and management companies (SAGIs), which are often on the front lines of designing and monitoring large-scale irrigated areas.
Many SAGIs are currently undergoing restructuring or institutional strengthening, with the ambition of once again becoming benchmark players in hydro-agricultural development within their countries. This ambition requires executives and managers capable of steering projects over the long term, applying rigorous processes, and capitalizing on past experiences, including those conducted with the support of technical and financial partners. Sharing experiences between companies facing similar challenges is a major lever for accelerating this capacity building at the regional level.
Together with its partners, COSTEA designs project owner training for executives and project managers of development companies. These training sessions, with limited enrollment (approximately twenty participants), prioritize practical and interactive work and are aimed at two complementary profiles: engineers and technical executives with confirmed experience in hydro-agricultural development, and project leads and managers responsible for implementing management processes.
Each training session is based on feedback from concrete projects and is accompanied by a long-term follow-up mechanism: production of shared methodological guides, mandatory internal debriefing for each participant, development of an individual action plan to be implemented within 90 days, and subsequent remote support over one year to evaluate the impact of the skills acquired and sustain best practices.
COSTEA is organizing a first session in Mauritania, in Nouakchott in November 2026, with SONADER and the AFD, as part of the restructuring of the Mauritanian company. It draws on feedback from the ASARIGG project (2018-2027) for the rehabilitation of village irrigated areas in the Senegal River Valley and is part of the regional action plan developed by the West African Network of Irrigation Development and Management Companies (ROA-SAGI). In addition to SONADER executives, it brings together one representative per partner SAGI from West Africa (Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad), as well as delegates from COSTEA, the ROA network, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the AFD.
This first session is intended to be replicated with other development companies in the region, following a logic of pooling tools and feedback to consolidate a common foundation of project owner practices across West Africa.