PIM, Poverty, and Gender

Transfer of irrigation management responsibilities change existing water management arrangements. This opens up new opportunities to strengthen the contribution of irrigation to poverty alleviation. PIM can benefit from insights gained on the impact of state-financed irrigation projects on the resource-poor. Here part of the water management responsibility is 'handed-over' to the users after construction/rehabilitation works are finished. 

The method appears to matter; different methodologies have had different impacts in comparable institutional and local settings. Main issues are:

Membership criteria:

Membership criteria for water users groups influence to whom management responsibilities and rights are transferred.

Household:

The concept of the unitary household, represented by the male head, has strongly contributed to an a priori exclusion of women and youngsters, even in female cropping systems (such as rice cultivation in river valleys in West Africa) and regions with strong male migration. Instead of reductionist and administrative criteria, membership criteria should be based on prevailing gendered organization of agriculture.

Land:

Formally registered land titles, another widely used membership criterion, also entail a bias against the resource-poor. Many cultivators only have use rights to the land. Disconnecting land and water rights is usually favorable for the resource-poor, who can produce more intensively, strengthen their effective land rights in this way or exploit these rights otherwise.

Command area:

As resource-poor farmers and new-coming migrants are more likely to be situated in tail-ends of schemes, defining the command area boundary could result in their exclusion.

Non-agricultural use:

Iirrigation water is also used for domestic purposes and livestock watering. Especially women would strongly benefit from legal recognition and more support to such multiple use.

Transfer 'Platforms':

For the transfer of rights and obligations from external agencies to water users, new platforms have to be created that are only partly based on existing organisations. This is an occasion to shift from the 'easy' administrative, political and male-elitist forms of organisation to more functional ones, which include priority target groups. This has proven to be very possible; provided it is done before a new planning process starts. Future water users groups and their multi-layered representation evolve from these very first platforms around new initiatives: quotas on proportion of women, or other groups, required in official water users group meetings may also introduced.

Connecting obligations and rights:

The problem for the resource-poor (men and especially women) is that they do pay and invest labour (once they are recognised as members), but do not get good water service even then. PIM is an occasion for transparent and public re-negotiation of the connection between obligations and rights.

Summary

To summarize, poverty alleviation is promoted by a PIM methodology based on: (1) Functional membership criteria, (2) Democratic PIM-platform, by including resource-poor men and women from the very first planning phases; and (3) Transparency of investments (labour, cash) and (4) water rights

- Barbara van Koppen, The Netherlands

Barbara van Koppen
Department of Irrigation and Soil and Water Conservation
Wageningen Agricultural University
Nieuwe Kanaal 11
6709 PA Wageningen, The Netherlands
Fax: (31-317-484759)
email: barbara.vanKoppen@users.tct.wau.nl