The establishment of the Bwanje Valley Irrigation Scheme (BVIS) in Malawi is a striking example of
informed amnesia in development assistance. Despite the lessons learned earlier concerning a process
approach to participatory irrigation development in Africa, in the case of BVIS outside interveners
designed an irrigation system and parachuted it into Bwanje Valley as a black-boxed technology. Using a
sociotechnical approach, this article analyses the travails of this irrigation scheme, showing that the
conventional irrigation factory mindset is ill suited for creating durable water-networks. Achieving
tangible improvements in rural livelihoods is better served by the interactive prototyping of water-networks
in situ, ensuring that new irrigation schemes are embedded in existing landscapes and complementary to
existing livelihood strategies rather than supplanting them.