Agri-vector water: boosting rainfed agriculture with urban water allocation to support urban–rural linkages

We propose the concept of ‘agri-vector water’ (AVW) to refer to water allocated to towns to maintain urban-based agricultural services that support rainfed farming in surrounding areas. AVW captures the idea that highly scarce ‘blue water’ can be productively used in this way to support rainfed ‘green water’ rather than be applied as consumptive irrigation, especially when the latter exacerbates water shortages during drought and dry seasons in arid and semi-arid regions. To illustrate, we present two case studies from Ethiopia.