Does small-scale irrigation provide a pathway to women's empowerment? Lessons from Northern Ghana: Fid-Bau Portal

Does small-scale irrigation provide a pathway to women's empowerment? Lessons from Northern Ghana

Bryan, Elizabeth / Mekonnen, Dawit

Abstract Given persistent gender inequalities that influence how the benefits of technologies are distributed, the expansion of small-scale irrigation technologies requires the consideration of important gender dynamics and impacts. Women's lack of agency and access to resources relative to men, and other social constraints, often limit their ability to adopt and benefit from agricultural technologies. At the same time, expanding access to agricultural technology to women may provide a pathway for empowerment. This paper explores the potential for small-scale irrigation technologies to increase women's empowerment by evaluating the impacts of an intervention that distributed motor pumps to small groups of farmers in Northern Ghana. The paper draws on two rounds of survey data that included the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index, before and after the motor pump intervention was implemented. To control for possible selection bias at the baseline, the difference-in-difference method is used to estimate the impact of the program on indicators of women's empowerment. Spillover effects are estimated by comparing outcomes of farmers in treatment villages that did not receive the pumps with farmers in control villages, where no motor pumps were distributed. The results show no significant impact of the program on measures of women's empowerment. However, there are potential negative impacts, including among households that did not benefit from the intervention. The results highlight the need to pair interventions that distribute agricultural technologies with complementary investments in infrastructure that increase access to water for irrigation, as well as other activities and approaches that ensure women can reap the benefits.

Highlights • Supplying men and women farmers with motor pumps for small-scale irrigation did not increase women's empowerment. • Rather, the intervention had negative spillover effects on women from households that did not receive pumps. • Women's empowerment in the study communities is generally increasing over time irrespective of the irrigation intervention. • The benefits of the motor pump intervention for women are indirect, including increasing household asset holdings. • More careful planning and implementation of irrigation interventions are needed facilitate women's empowerment.