"For women, access to irrigation assets is especially challenging…"
--Rural Poverty Report, p. 93

THEME: Irrigation assets are highly valued, and in the competition, women often lose out.

The IFAD Rural Poverty Report 2001 argues for raising poor people's control over water-yielding assets. Irrigation can greatly improve returns from land, with beneficial results on household food insecurity and incomes. But the report also notes that the poor, and particularly poor women, have a difficult time obtaining access to irrigation water.

Efforts by development initiatives have usually not been fully successful in providing women farmers with secure access to irrigated assets. Sometimes women obtain access indirectly or acquire irregular or seasonal access, but even when they do obtain use of irrigated land, they may end up losing it.

• In Burkina Faso, some women are lent irrigated land during the dry season so that they can grow vegetables.
• In Ecuador, women have to rely on social networks to get annual and ad hoc access to irrigation water. They do not obtain secure rights.
• In Kenya, women have to pay men for irrigation water. They cannot obtain direct access.

There appear to be a number of causes for women's difficulties:

• Women's insecure rights to land act as a barrier.
• Water access may be dependent on access to credit for land purchase, an area where women also face constraints.
• There is often fierce competition for irrigated land, and because women have less social or political power, they tend to lose out in the struggle.
• The view that women cannot contribute fully to irrigation system maintenance acts to exclude them (for instance, in Kenya). However, in some countries, women are as active as men in digging irrigation canals and maintaining them.
• There may be a cultural association of irrigation water rights with males (in the same way that larger livestock and animal traction is often considered men's domain).

When projects have tried to ensure better access for women to irrigated land (for example, by designating it for women's crops), the result is sometimes that the crop is taken over by the men. This occurred with rice irrigation under an IFAD project in Gambia.

The IFAD report states that "partial participation" by women in irrigation projects may still benefit them. Women's consumption improved in Gambia, for instance, even though their control of assets and status did not. Women may also be able to use the water for their livestock or their domestic needs even though they cannot use it for their crops. But is there potential for other uses? The report refers to an NGO initiative in Bangladesh in which women's groups were financed and trained to control water-yielding assets and sell the water mainly to male farmers.

Irrigation is an area of development that needs more gender attention. Indirect or weak access of women farmers to irrigation water is better than nothing, but it is not enough.

Adapted from:

IFAD. 2001. Rural Poverty Report 2001: The Challenge of Ending Rural Poverty. Oxford University Press. February.

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