Ensuring Women Farmers Get the Water They Need

Irrigation agencies often operate on the premise that all farmers are men, leaving women farmers with unequal access to water and no recourse for addressing the resulting imbalance.

This old problem is being addressed by a new tool. IWMI and partners have developed the "Gender Performance Indicator for Irrigation (GPII)" that can help reduce gender imbalances in irrigation management decisions. Developed with support from the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida), Ford Foundation and the Government of the Netherlands.

Ensuring women farmers have access to resources and to decision-making forums, such as Water Users Organizations, is increasingly being recognized as vital not only for women’s livelihoods but also for the viability of many irrigation schemes.

"There is still a big gap between good intentions and effective action," said Barbara van Koppen, a gender and water expert at IWMI. "Policy makers and change agents need new tools to help diagnose gender issues in irrigation schemes and design appropriate interventions."

GPII measures inclusion/exclusion at three different levels:

• Women’s and men’s access to water and irrigated land at farm level
  
• Inclusion in irrigator’s network in which rules for infrastructure construction, operation and maintenance are set and enforced
• Eligibility and election for leadership positions and women’s capacity to function well in these roles

To successfully address exclusion of women, irrigation interventions need to take into account the role women already play in agriculture. In some well-intentioned cases, attempts to improve the situation have done so by forcing blanket gender-inclusiveness onto farming systems where women do not traditionally participate, except in specific tasks such as weeding or harvesting.

"Blanket measures seldom achieve anything beyond window dressing," asserts van Koppen. "Trying to ensure all women participating in farming get equal access to irrigation water, without regard to the type or level of participation, is unrealistic and in the end fails to reach even those women whose livelihoods depend on having equal access."

GPII addresses such situations by distinguishing between women who are farm decision-makers and women who participate only in specific farming tasks. This difference is often overlooked in the formulation of ‘gender-sensitive’ projects and interventions, with the end result that these fail to address the true needs of women farmers.

For more information, visit www.iwmi.cgiar.org