Agricultural Water Management in Africa: Lessons Learned and Future Directions - Chapter 12 - Gender equality and social inclusion in agricultural water management

This chapter has briefly outlined why gender matters for agricultural water management (AWM) as it is central to sub-Saharan Africa’s employment and livelihood opportunities. The RBET framework offers an opportunity to operationalize GESI across the AWM spectrum from rainfed to fully irrigated agriculture. The framework, however, needs to go beyond irrigation and focus on the Gender transformation approach, which will change the cultural practices and gender norms for more gendered AVM-based livelihoods. This chapter focused on fully irrigated agriculture, covering both the informal (farmer-led) and the government (state-led) irrigation development interventions, and highlighted the importance of irrigated agriculture as a mechanism for coping with the ongoing climate change and climate variability. While climate change might be the same in a given area, the vulnerability to climate change and variability is gendered. Women, youths, people with disabilities, and those without assets to change their production will be more negatively affected than those who are better placed to respond. Beyond irrigated agriculture, gender equality within the food systems will be brought about by increasing girls and women's access to education, better access to better agricultural inputs, and technological innovations which are undergirded by inclusive financing mechanisms. This chapter has therefore endeavored to demonstrate that AWM is not gender neutral. It is therefore important to use a gender lens in both identifying the AWM challenges and the related solutions.