Community-managed reservoirs have the potential to transform livelihoods and improve food security for rural farmers in semi-arid Burkina Faso by providing year-round agricultural water access. Despite construction of over 1000 reservoirs in Burkina Faso over the last century, there is a lack of understanding of how reservoir water resources and their benefits are distributed among farmers, and the challenges and solutions for making resource access fair and sustainable for positive development outcomes. This dataset presents findings from 197 structured interviews with reservoir irrigators, pastoralists, fishers, and non-users conducted at two case study sites in Centre-Est Burkina Faso. Participants were asked who benefits (or not) from reservoir water resources, the benefits associated with access to these resources, and perceived challenges and solutions to achieving more sustainable and equitable resource management. Of the 111 questionnaire respondents at Bidiga, and 72 respondents from Ladwenda, 78 % and 90 % respectively use reservoir resources. Results show that there are no female non-users among the respondents at Ladwenda, while at Bidiga 58 % of female respondents were reservoir users compared to 87 % of male respondents. At both sites, reservoir resource users and non-users were fairly evenly represented across age groups with the exception of respondents in the 50-78 yr old group at Ladwenda, who are all users. Reservoir users include farmers from all seven ethnic groups represented in this survey. Responses indicate stark divisions in resource access split along gender, age and income lines. Current or anticipated future threats to water resources create high uncertainty for farmers who rely on reservoir resources for food or income. There will be trade-offs between long and short term solutions (e.g. protecting slopes from erosion versus dredging) to reservoir resource management challenges, and social solutions are the immediate priority for local users. Several promising, low-cost options were identified for improving distributional equity so reservoirs benefit more farmers.Effective community-based management of common pool resources (CPR) in contexts facing environmental degradation and social conflict is urgently required to sustainably move people worldwide towards a decent level of human well-being, as sought in the Sustainable Development Goals. In the seasonally dry tropics, water stored in reservoirs. co-managed by communities and state water management agencies, can transform the lives of people in areas of persistent poverty by providing dry season income and food security through fish, livestock and crop production. Yet the inequitable distribution of water and other agricultural resources leads to stark inequalities in costs and benefits of reservoirs among households and communities. This project will convene stakeholders around two reservoirs in Boulgou province, Burkina Faso, through 'Innovation Platforms' (IPs) that provide spaces for face-to-face learning, exchange and negotiation. Through the IPs, differentiated stakeholders with conflicts of interests related to reservoirs will identify, compare and implement community-driven innovations to make management of and access to land, water and associated benefits more equitable and sustainable. In collaboration with local communities and water management institutes, we will co- design and test locally relevant indicators and novel data collection techniques to establish a reliable, locally owned reservoir resource monitoring system. Students, extension workers and government technicians will be trained on automatic weather stations, mobile phone based surveys, and easily measured indicators of soil and water quality. The project will fill gaps in knowledge regarding factors and approaches that enable the resolution of conflicts related to the management of CPR and the development of participatory monitoring systems. Academic beneficiaries include scientists working on participatory approaches, conflict resolution, social equity, and CPR management.

Data were collected around two reservoirs: Bidiga and Lagwenda. Our objective was to interview a representative sample (>30 each) of reservoir users and non-users at each reservoir. There was no registry of houses located in the vicinity of each reservoir and no documentation on which households or individuals used each reservoir for irrigation, livestock watering, fishing or domestic uses, making it challenging to selectively target different user groups. We sought to interview individuals from many different villages to help ensure different perspectives were captured and in the expectation that this increase the likelihood that different types of users and non-users were included in the sample. From previous participatory mapping activities in the communities we knew the locations and names of villages within 5km of each reservoir. We digitised individual houses visible on Google Earth imagery within 5km of each reservoir and then randomly selected 100 households per reservoir, stratified to include at least 3 households from each village. Enumerators then sought to interview an individual (preferably the head) in each of these households. When members of the target household were not at home, an alternative nearby household was selected at random by the enumerators. Data were collected using Kobo Collect on handheld android tablets.