Albania - Role of Women in PIM

In many countries the word for water is associated with the female gender. Women, who are the bearer of life, were in earlier times and remain today linked symbolically with water, meaning water is life! In this article I present the problems and the outlook of women's participation in irrigation management in the Irrigation Rehabilitation Project (IRP) in Albania.

The Irrigation Rehabilitation Project

Financed by several donors and executed by the Albanian Ministry of Agriculture and Food, IRP assists with the rehabilitation of large scale irrigation systems that were laid out during the Soviet period as part of state farms and cooperatives. Since the project began in 1994, it has completed primary and secondary channel rehabilitation for 98,906 ha of irrigation and drainage channels for 117,046 ha. During the first year of the project, 200 Water Users Associations were established.

A Society In Transition

Albania is a transitional society undergoing structural changes where privatization has introduced a new institutional farming production system: the family farm. As in most excommunist countries, this is accompanied by a change in value orientations in farm management approaches from security to risk, from obedience to decision making and taking initiatives, and from former segmentation of works to aggregation and holistic approaches. Now homegrown wheat and alfalfa (as fodder for cows) is essential for women to complement the diets of their children and for generating income from the sale of milk. Beans are regarded as a women's crop and raising vegetables is more and more valued as an income-earning activity.

While women's special gains in education and professional areas are more or less safeguarded, economic problems and structural changes have eradicated many of their former jobs and therefore too many women have had to resort to housework, or work on the family farm. In general, women and men decide jointly on farming decisions. Yet, there are problems; for example communication between the husband who attends WUA meetings and his wife needs to be improved.

The women in development (WID) section of the IRP tries to sensitize men to this issue and delivers a lot of information to women who do not participate in meetings and often do not know what the project is all about. Women in Albania are still the silent half in irrigation projects despite their visibility while working in the fields. Research has indicated that women do much more than 50% of agricultural work and figures of 80% are often claimed. This is one of the reasons why the IRP is eager to involve women as official users, i.e. as members in decision making bodies in the WUAs of the program.

What Changes have Occurred?

The new political and production systems in Albania have restructured landholding since the fall of the communist regime. Every farm family has received, on average, 1,5 ha as private land. In most cases that area is not enough to produce a surplus for being able to cover necessary investments for intensive agriculture with adequate technology. But people are sustaining their families and producing extra farm produce for sale to generate income nevertheless. These families do not rely only on farm income. Many men are migrant workers in other countries and they help their families left behind economically to survive and to safeguard their land plot. A recent study revealed that in 1996, 69% of cash income in rural households derived from offfarm activities.

This situation is not conducive to economically empowering individuals in farm development. A steady income from outside negatively impacts their ability to raise the value of their own production platform -- the family farm. In some parts of our project area we learned that up to 20% of households were affected by out-migration and therefore many women became heads of households. Although they were targeted as potentially becoming more active in the WUA's, they were usually more overburdened with household chores and farm work than women from households where the husband, as the household head, was still present. Often they have to pay laborers for hard work in the field, such as ploughing.

Problems for Women in WUA's

Thus, rural women in Albania are interested in actively participating in WUA schemes, but structural changes and changes in technology are a burden especially to women. They have lost many communal and social amenities like bakeries and kindergartens, which in former times were free services. And even worse, agriculture is no longer mechanized like it was before on the state farms. So the double burden of reproductive and productive work today leaves women little time and energy to participate actively in communal affairs like WUA issues. This remains to be the reserve of men.

The IRP Strategy for Women's Participation

Sensitization, not power, is the base for any long-lasting changes in attitudes towards the full participation of formerly neglected groups, in our case, the women farmers. As part of its strategy to eliminate some of these barriers and to get more women onto the executive boards of our WUA's, the WID section has started a campaign and has organized workshops to sensitize farm women and interested men on women's enormous responsibility as active members of WUA's. Pamphlets with cartoons and questions to be discussed in the immediate family circle were distributed at schools and on markets in an effort to increase the number of women in decision making bodies like executive councils and administrative councils.

During the last elections within the WUA's three times more women entered this sphere of men than in comparison to the previous year's the election. The expanded involvement of women in WUAs in Albania has prompted IRP to contact the Albanian Development Fund (ADF), a World-Bank financed rural credit program, and propose a pilot project with two women credit groups of the WUAs.

Participation And Transparency

Participation is indispensable for sustainable management of peoples' own services, such as irrigation schemes. However, historically in Albania social sciences have been neglected; only very recently has sociology as a subject entered the university curricula. As a consequence, extension agents, social workers, and community development workers have not been trained in participatory and social communication techniques to enhance the cohesion of social interest groups.

Additionally, the history of forced collectivism is not very conducive for changes in attitudes and trust building (i.e. transparency). Historically-embedded notions of hierarchy remain a very big obstacle for participation in Albania. Methods and policies to overcome this heritage are based on transparency. Transparency is widely used as a communication and control mechanism for all parties involved in communal exercises and other relevant matters like policies. It is today very difficult for farmers in Albania to go beyond family ties for any communal activity. But common interest groups, who share risks and jobs, are the foundation of IRP's work. To change attitudes in a step-by-step approach requires a lot of information, communication exchange, and sensitization on various levels. This challenge was tackled by the IRP and its WIJA section including the Women in Development section through intensive training in the head office and in the districts.

Capacity Building

Our extension staff of coordinators, promoters, and WUA's were trained through 11 workshops in participatory methods and adult education. Some of our promoters are women since rural Albanian women have expressed a preference in being addressed by women, which in itself is an important note in arranging for extension staff in PIM programs. Capacity building training is a process mechanism where old ways of training are been questioned and contrasted with the new one. Our training includes:

(i) Transfer of Communication Skills. The transfer of communication skills and methods increase already existing capacities to a maximum output. How can everybody be transparent in presenting the results of his work to others? How can neglected groups like the old, women or children or those who are not interested in this process be included in it?

(ii) Planning Methods. The transfer of basic planning methods is based on the five classic w's: who, what, when, where, and why. Further techniques were taught as common tools for planning and for problem solving within groups to increase transparency and to strengthen corporate group identity. The latter is needed very much with local WUA's and at a national level.

Gender Awareness Training

Gender awareness training of staff, along with participatory methods encouraged people to think about and question stereotypes about women's roles within society and within the working sphere of the WUA and in agriculture generally. This was carried out using participatory techniques to induce discussions. In other words, the above objective is that the PMU staff is empowered to make good use of them and will subsequently be responsible to work with these techniques in order to be more at ease and to be able to give better guidance to the WUA's in their group cohesion work.

Working With Rural Women In WUA's

The most important and challenging task for the project is to raise income generation among women through training. Here we view women as producers. The active participation of women in WUA's is required, to back up appropriate irrigation systems. The experience of the IRP illustrates that there will not be sustainable irrigation without the active input of women in Albania at all levels. In contrast to other NGO's in Albania, which use money as an incentive for participation, the project categorically refuses this approach in working with the WUAs. We managed to get the idea through that information is power and is necessary to produce more and better and that it represents by itself a value for which people should strive. Our training proved to be so attractive that after each session more women requested it and would attend. The themes of this training are presented below.

Income Generation Through Vegetable Production

In the irrigation project sometimes rainfed wheat was grown on possible irrigation areas. The project encouraged production of this rain fed crop on drainage areas, which had been rehabilitated as well. Wheat, the most common crop in Albania, is kept basically for subsistence or household food security reasons. While some argue that the economic value for growing vegetables on suitable irrigated areas would increase incomes by two-thirds, this is not possible at the moment for reasons of input supply problems and their prices. Formerly subsidized inputs now have an open market price and are therefore not feasible for the farmers. Another problem is a lack of adequate marketing and storage.

In order to increase incomes from vegetables, which are produced in abundance by women in Albania, the project undertook some pilot interventions to improve intensified vegetable production . The aim was to save money by using and applying the right and timely correct pest management and fertilizer even on small plots. The existing knowledge of WUA women in vegetable production was the base for this training, and in a step-by-step approach their knowledge was coupled with our dissemination of the newest and cheapest methods available to reduce their production costs and to increase the quality.

Training workshops were conducted for women from the WUA's in all districts on integrated pest management and mixed cropping for vegetables in order to cut down expenses on pesticides. Even compost production for vegetable seed beds and therefore better resource management was covered. Today only a few farmers still do it. Additionally, the biological pest management still known by their grandparents was revealed in the lively discussions. Our training method is based on a variety of visual material, which was mainly developed by the WID section itself. Handouts were distributed to the participants as well to have something in their hands and to take home for contemplation and discussion within the farm family.

The response of farm women in the WUA's was positive and enthusiastic in response to greater information sharing. New ideas on farm management regarding the vegetable production chain from production to marketing, and even communal marketing were discussed. All this can help women in the WUA's to open their horizons on how to solve special problems of the producers in a bigger group than just the family, i.e. in a participatory way.

Margareth Hammer
WID/GAD Consultant PMU/IRP
Tirana, Albania
nc-hammerma@netcologne.de