Abraham Salomon

Abraham Salomon is a project manager with 15 years of experience managing research and development projects on irrigated and rainfed smallholder farming systems. He has been working with the Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute since October 2024. The focus of this work has been on understanding technology choice, adoption, and management practices used by smallholder farmers and irrigators in East Africa. This has included projects researching participatory extension and market development approaches, as well as participatory irrigation development in collaboration with the University of California, Davis. He has also managed studies researching drivers of irrigation adoption and participation in irrigation programs for the World Bank, and understanding the geospatial patterns of irrigation and mechanization in Uganda for research teams at Columbia University. Other work has focused on scaling financing for water storage on smallholder dairy farms in Kenya for Precision Development and founding Agriworks Uganda, a pioneering provider of irrigation as a service in Uganda. He holds a BSc in Community and Regional Development from the University of California, Davis.

Responsibilities:

• Support research and analysis on emerging business models for providing irrigation to smallholder farmers
• Identify and assess opportunities for scaling impacts of irrigation for smallholder farmers through business model and technical innovation
• Develop insights, hypotheses, and research questions on emerging private sector approaches to scaling smallholder irrigation
• Contribute to knowledge products to share findings on innovative irrigation approaches