Women And Small Scale Irrigation A Review Of The Factors Influencing Gendered Patterns Of Participation And Benefits PDF Download

Women’s participation has been identified as a necessary component of agricultural development projects, including those focused on small-scale irrigation and water management. The inclusion of women alone, however, does not address several intersectional gender and social dynamics that emerge in participatory development activities. Expanding previous work on the importance of integrating women in development and drawing on feminist critiques to extend inclusion-based strategies, this study interrogates and co-defines with Ugandan farmers what makes participation “meaningful,” and for whom. Irrigation, which has been recommended as a strategic focus in responding to the challenges of dry-season, drought-impacted and flood-prone agriculture in East Africa, is central to this study due to its reliance on shared water resources and therefore highly social processes of governance and decision-making. Focused on the Horticulture Irrigation Project (HIP) in eastern Uganda, this paper particularly explores gender norms related to participatory irrigation and emphasizes the heterogeneity of farmers’ experiences in this context, including differences among women associated with characteristics such as marital status, age, parental status, and other sociocultural factors that undergird farmer group dynamics. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, four primary themes related to gender surfaced in this research: respectability and responsibility, labor capacity and roles, vulnerability, and autonomy and ownership. The gender norms expressed through these themes operate as significant but nuanced influences on how different farmers choose or are able to participate in irrigation groups, and their perceived outcomes of that participation. This analysis of the relationships between gender and farmer participation in a Ugandan context can inform similar irrigation projects by encouraging an intersectional, site-specific approach to gender equity work that refuses to essentialize “women” and that recognizes complex power dynamics as central, practical concerns for agricultural development.