Agricultural Water Management (AWM) is essential to food security, but it also plays a fundamental role in building human capital in rural areas. This checklist on gender in AWM recognises the importance of multiple-use in that.

Men and women often have different roles and needs in the use and management of water resources. In addition, access to, rights to and control over water (and land) also tends to be different for women and men worldwide and in part, reflects existing social relations in power. Policy and decision-making regarding land and water management have traditionally been the domain of men. As a result policies and programs do not always consider women’s unique knowledge, needs or unequal ownership and benefit rights. Particularly successful Agricultural Water Management (AWM) projects:

• Prevent elites from capturing project benefits and extends these benefits to a much larger population base to include large and small scale women farmers, landless women, female land owners and wage labourers as well as other categories of women farmers;

• Address both women and men’s domestic and productive water needs. To date, many single-sector projects are implemented for either irrigation or domestic water supply, rather than both, which overlooks the multiple-use needs of rural communities;

• Explicitly seek to increase women’s capacity to participate in domestic water and irrigation projects and plan for ways to increase women’s access to other productive resources;

• Encompass an approach that takes into account the social, economic and institutional realities of the project area and allocates resources to studies which consider these issues in the planning stage.