1. Technical Workshop on Gender and Irrigation
Innovation Lab for Small-Scale Irrigation
Technical Workshop on Gender and Irrigation
April 13-14, 2016
Accra, Ghana
Photo credit: IWMI Flickr, Ghana, 2011; Passarelli, Ghana, 2015

2. What is your vision for gender-equitable irrigation and water access
What is your vision for gender-equitable irrigation and water access? Describe at least three characteristics you envision for gender-equitable irrigation
What are the main challenges you have faced promoting gender equality in practice in your work?
What are common misconceptions or “myths” regarding women’s role in water access?
What do you hope to get out of the workshop? What questions do you have that you hope the workshop will address?

3. VISION
Gender equality is not in every task – specialization is ok
Important that people do what they value and what they perceive to be equitable.
What we do want to aim for is more equal benefit sharing (e.g. control over income, leisure time, decision making power)…and men shouldn’t necessarily specialize in relaxation!
Provide opportunity by expanding choice: more options that work for women, including functionality (multiple use systems), affordability, capacity strengthening, access to credit

4. MYTHS and concerns
Why is gender an issue in irrigation in the first place? If the household is better off with irrigation, then women will be too (assumption that resource sharing within household is equitable)
Women aren’t involved in irrigation – only domestic water. Women are more “conservative” by nature and less likely to uptake new technologies
Access = physical availability
Assumptions that the technologies are not “women-friendly”
Gender = women (e.g. to promote gender equality, just work with women)
If women are economically empowered, will they still respect men?

5. CHALLENGES Women’s access to and control over irrigable land
Access to capital
Access to labor
Issues along the value chain need to be addressed
Limited access to water source (e.g. elites control dugout well)
Participation in WUAs and community-level decision-making
Women very time burdened – hard to ask them to do more

6. QUESTIONS What constitutes “women-friendly technologies”?
What needs to happen to meet the 40% quota for women in Water User Associations (WUAs)?
Because most irrigation is informal and have no WUAs, how to ensure participation of women in decision making over water?
How to address some of these cross-cutting constraints that affect multiple outcomes in women’s empowerment in agriculture, including: how to increase women’s access to extension services, control over land, access to credit?
How to understand gender relations? What tools can be used?
The search for “women-friendly irrigation technology” – is it the technology itself, the institutions around technology (information, financing, organization, norms), or the women (skills development) that need to be “modified”?
but may have to do with access, norms, and institutions surrounding technology

7. Gender integration framework – fill something out like a worksheet