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Although gender is a priority on the agendas of irrigation policy makers, interventionists, irrigation leaders and researchers, the gap between positive intentions and concrete action is still considerable. An important but hitherto ignored cause for this gap lies in the lack of adequate conceptualization and methodological tools that provide the insights that policy makers and change agents need.
The challenges to improve the current body of knowledge on gender and irrigation are fourfold. First, in order to accommodate the huge variation in the gendered organization of farming across the globe, policy makers and change agents need generic analytical tools that capture relevant and site-specific issues in any irrigation context, including the role of irrigation agencies themselves. Second, concepts need to be accurate and valid. Water obtains its value only as input in an encompassing farm enterprise. The significance of water for women farm decision- makers, who mobilize inputs themselves, differs fundamentally from its importance for women who are family laborers in farm households managed by their male kin. This needs to be taken into account in conceptualizing water in the gendered organization of farming, preferably quantitatively. Third, analytical tools for gender analysis should be easy to apply in an intervention context. Last but not least, the meaning and merits of “gender- inclusiveness” need to be clear, widely endorsed and well corroborated by evidence in order to serve as a generic yardstick for measuring “good gender performance.”
The consensus that women farm decision- makers perform as well as men farm decision- makers, provided women have equal access to resources, is widely accepted. In this context, irrigation institutions that provide water resources equally to women farm decision-makers as to men farm decision-makers have a “good gender performance.” Such performance boosts the productivity of schemes and increases incomes for both genders.
These four challenges incited the Poverty, Gender and Water Project of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) to develop a Gender Performance Indicator for Irrigation (GPII). The Indicator was tested in nine case studies in Burkina Faso, South Africa, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. This generic analytical tool answers the question whether irrigation institutions in a particular irrigation scheme are gender-inclusive and, if not, what irrigation agencies themselves can do to affect change. The tool also identifies gender issues that are rooted in a society’s agrarian structure—beyond a strict mandate of irrigation water provision alone. The tool is meant for policy and intervention purposes at all levels and for academic use worldwide.
This report presents the underlying concepts of the GPII and methodological guidelines for its application. In addition, salient findings of selected applications of the GPII in Asia and Africa are presented to highlight how the tool captures policy-relevant variation. The GPII seeks to answer two questions for empirical analysis in any particular scheme. The first question is whether the farm decision-makers in a scheme are predominantly male (a male farming system), female (a female farming system) or mixed (a dual farming system). The second question addresses inclusion and exclusion processes of women farm decision- makers, who are the majority in a female farming system and the minority in a male farming system. Irrigation institutions are defined as the collective arrangements at scheme level for water control and use. Three inter-related levels of irrigation institutions are distinguished: farm, forum, and leadership levels. This distinction gives analytical clarity and specifies action—if needed. The main “performer” in shaping inclusion or exclusion at any of these levels is either the irrigation agency (a factor that irrigation agencies can change) or locally prevailing production and institutional arrangements (which cannot be changed by irrigation agencies alone).
Gender performance is assessed by identifying the absence or presence of gender- based differences. Good gender performance means that gender based differences are absent (+). If mild gender-based differences exist, it is categorized as moderate performance (+/–). If there is categorical gender-based exclusion, it is identified as low gender performance (–). This classification is done for:
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Equal farm-level access to water and related obligations (water rights are connected to obligations that individual farmers have to carry out to earn their rights), which is directly related to equal access to resources for both genders for higher productivity and higher incomes.
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Equal participation in forums or networks for collective water management arrangements—generally required for strengthening access to water at farm level.
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Equality at leadership-level in the sense that the gender composition of leaders should reflect the gender composition of the farmers in the scheme. Also, women leaders should be able to function as well as men.
From selected applications of the GPII in female and dual farming systems and from other literature on the subject, it appears that irrigation agencies themselves tend to be the sole cause of exclusion and inclusion of women farm decision-makers. Where female or dual farming systems prevail, agencies exclude women from irrigation institutions by completely ignoring the local gendered organization of farming while vesting far-reaching powers and resource rights in the local (male) elite only. On the other hand, once agencies purposively include both male and female farm decision-makers in a bottom-up way into accountable irrigation institutions, they smoothly establish inclusiveness, higher productivity and the improvement of incomes for both genders.
The applications of the GPII in male farming systems yield different results. In the majority of farms, women are unpaid family farm workers. These local arrangements exclude the majority of women a priori from irrigation institutions. Local male dominance also leads to the exclusion of the minority of women who manage their own farms, especially at forum and leadership levels. Therefore within a strict mandate of water provision, the role of irrigation agencies is limited to supporting the minority of women farm decision- makers. For the majority of women, the issue is changing local production relations, where water is just one factor out of a range of factors. In such cases, agrarian societies and change agents, including irrigation agencies, need to promote women’s farming opportunities in general.
Where female and dual farming systems prevail, efforts by agencies to include women systematically in irrigation institutions are definitely required in order to reach productivity goals. However, blanket measures to include all women in irrigation institutions are unrealistic, if not counterproductive, in male farming systems. For any effective irrigation intervention, it is imperative that the variation in gendered local production arrangements is understood. Applications of the GPII confirm that gender always needs to be taken into account and they also answer the question how .