Going with the Flow

This brief article examines female community participation in poverty reduction through the concrete example of Bangladesh's Small-Scale Water Resources Development Project. Initiated in 1996 by the Local Government Engineering Department (and supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), International Fund for Agriculture Development, Government of the Netherlands, Government of Bangladesh, and the beneficiaries themselves), the project's second phase is to be carried out through to 2009.

Eric van Zant reports that "Project beneficiaries have been organized under the water management cooperative associations through which they are responsible for everything from planning, designing, and constructing canals, channels, and other infrastructure, to providing user-financed operation and maintenance. "

The thesis of this article is that women's participation in the project has been crucial to its success (in phase one, some 190,000 farm families, over 70% of them either small or marginal landholders or landless farmers, raised their productivity and income and replicability) and its replicability (ADB is using the participatory approach to water resources development in Cambodia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, and Vietnam). “If we are not bringing women into the decision-making process, their problems will not be addressed properly,” says Bashir Uddin Ahmed, Project Director. Thus, "the project aims to increase the number of women involved in water management cooperative associations to 30% of the total - previously there were none. It also wants to improve their skills, and to better assess their needs to ensure they derive benefits. To make this happen, a gender specialist position has been created on the project team and an international gender expert also provides advice. To create an environment supportive of women, the project includes conducting gender capacity training in local government engineering departments, collecting data to reflect gender issues, and commissioning the design of gender-sensitive training modules. The project is also working to ensure that one third of all operation and maintenance committee members are women, and is supervising work and wage differentials between men and women to ensure equal pay for equal work."

Jinnat Ali, Secretary of the predominantly male water management committee of the Nongakhal (Ichhali) Water Management Cooperative Association, is motivated to include women in these committees perhaps for a different reason: "Women do better work. (They) are a very important part of our subcommittees", he says.