Agriculture is still the engine of growth in the overall economic well-being in an increasingly globalized world. Therefore, many countries aspire the economic development through agriculture, thus making it the most important driver in water exploitation. While the demand is rapidly growing, water resources are becoming limited that leads to overall imbalance between demand and supply. A more efficient use of water in agriculture would certainly help. In response to this, considerable number of policy initiatives came into force that promoted irrigation development to keep up with the growing demand. However, many of them have not been brought to the ground yet due to their little-explored effect on the economic, agronomic and environmental conditions. The pathways of irrigation development – almost certainly essential for combating food security and poverty – need new approaches to close the gap between the conceptual frameworks and pragmatic approaches. Creating policy instruments have received broad attention over the last decades to ensure the sustainability of the resources. In many cases, water policies were introduced as integrated parts of natural resource policy, energy policy or climate policy. The emerging concern of decreasing water resources set the scope to improve governance in water sector to create more enabling environment for policy and regulation. As the World Water Council, 2012 articulated “To improve governance in the water sector, we need to balance social dimensions with economic demands and environmental needs”. Increasing potential output of water use is particularly important in countries where the majority of the population is reliant on agriculture, and agriculture accounts a high share of water consumption. Based on AQUASTAT statistics, agriculture shares the 69 per cent of the total water withdrawal, but the ratio varies much between regions. Meanwhile, agricultural water withdrawal makes up only 21 per cent in Europe; it takes 82 per cent in Africa. As available water resources have direct impact on the livelihood, the effective use of water is at the core of development and pro-poor strategies. One of the striking constraints to achieve this goal is the fragmented size of lands, whereas small farms create a high temporal- and spatial variability of water demand. Small-scale irrigation schemes often present high degree of heterogeneity and disparity among the farmers and are less resourced to increase efficiency. However, 80 per cent of the farms in sub-Saharan Africa are still cultivated by smallholders, for whom enabling environment in increasingly needed. The objective of this guide is to overcome these challenges and provide support to enhance water use efficiency in small-scale schemes through policy recommendations (Bhattarai, Sakthivadivel, Hussain, 2002).