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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.

ABSTRACT:

Over the past decade there has been a growing interest in the potential benefits related to the productive use of rural piped water around the homestead. However, there is limited empirical research on the extent to which, and conditions under which, this activity occurs. Using data obtained from a comprehensive study of 47 rural piped water systems in Senegal, this paper reveals the extent of piped-water-based productive activity occurring and identifies important system-level variables associated with this activity. Three-quarters (74%) of the households surveyed depend on water for their livelihoods with around one-half (54%) relying on piped water. High levels of piped-water-based productive activity were found to be associated with shorter distances from a community to a city or paved road (i.e. markets), more capable water system operators and water committees, and communities that contributed to the construction of the piped water system. Further, access to electricity was associated with higher productive incomes from water-based productive activities, highlighting the role that non-water-related inputs have on the extent of productive activities undertaken. Finally, an analysis of the technical performance of piped water systems found no statistically significant association between high vs. low levels of productive activity and system performance; however, a positive relationship was found between system performance and the percentage of households engaged in productive activities.

Divisions between communities, disciplinary and practice, impede understanding of how complex interventions in health and other sectors actually work and slow the development and spread of more effective ones. We test this hypothesis by re-reviewing a Cochrane-standard systematic review (SR) of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions’ impact on child diarrhoea morbidity: can greater understanding of impacts and how they are achieved be gained when the same papers are reviewed jointly from health and development perspectives?

Using realist review methods, researchers examined the 27 papers for evidence of other impact pathways operating than assumed in the papers and SR. Evidence relating to four questions was judged on a scale of likelihood. At the ‘more than possible’ or ‘likely’ level, 22% of interventions were judged to involve substantially more actions than the SR’s label indicated; 37% resulted in substantial additional impacts, beyond reduced diarrhoea morbidity; and unforeseen actions by individuals, households or communities substantially contributed to the impacts in 48% of studies. In 44%, it was judged that these additional impacts and actions would have substantially affected the intervention’s effect on diarrhoea morbidity. The prevalence of these impacts and actions might well be found greater in studies not so narrowly selected. We identify six impact pathways suggested by these studies that were not considered by the SR: these are tentative, given the limitations of the literature we reviewed, but may help stimulate wider review and primary evaluation efforts.

This re-review offers a fuller understanding of the impacts of these interventions and how they are produced, pointing to several ways in which investments might enhance health and wellbeing. It suggests that some conclusions of the SR and earlier reviews should be reconsidered. Moreover, it contributes important experience to the continuing debate on appropriate methods to evaluate and synthesize evidence on complex interventions.

Open access article by Michael Loevinsohn, Lyla Mehta, Katie Cuming, Alan Nicol, Oliver Cumming and Jeroen H. J. Ensink published in the Oxford journal Health and Policy Planning.

This report documents the experiences in Swaziland, where the Swaziland Water and Agricultural Development Enterprise (SWADE) was the implementing agent of the project ‘Capacity Building for the Lavumisa Irrigation Development Project’.