Participatory development for female empowerment

In my last post, I expressed the need for a more balanced interpretation of the term 'gendered' and touched on the idea that female empowerment is not solely reliant on the presence of an adequate water supply. A comment which Sristi Gurung left on my post made me think more about the variation in the ways that female empowerment might be experienced, and the ways that identities such as ethnicity, generation, affluence and location might affect this. In this post, I have therefore decided to explore the extent to which female empowerment is experienced as a result of water development projects which call themselves participatory.  

As might be expected, approaches to resource development in poor communities have been evolving, with a noticeable shift towards the idea of participatory development over recent decades. The idea of participatory development has become so well thought of that it instantly conjures up thoughts of a project which is both effective and empowering for all members of the community it is concerned with. Development which is both efficient and effective is, I'm sure, the goal of almost every project planner out there. Thus, participatory development has become a buzzword for success, a mandatory component of any credible NGO or government-led development project (Cleaver 1999; Van der Zaag, 2005). In other words, if it isn’t participatory, is it really a development project?

But what exactly does the term participatory entail? It has become more and more associated particularly with female empowerment within a community, but increasing usage of the term has meant that its true meaning has become a little distorted. The extent and purpose of participatory development can vary, as if on a scale. At one end there is efficient participation, and at the other there is empowering participation. Most projects will place themselves neither at one end of the scale or the other, but somewhere in the middle. Efficient participation is that which gets the project done in the quickest time possible, with economic and environmental resource usage being as low as possible. In contrast, empowering participatory development is a process which increases the capacity of community members to enhance their standards of living, and move towards a more equitable society (Cleaver, 1999).

In terms of water development, I feel empowering participation is generally the most suitable approach, especially for women and young girls. In previous posts I mentioned the strong relationship between women and water in many developing countries. So much so, that the central role of women in the provision of water is an internationally accepted principle of water management (Ray, 2007). However it is important to consider the complexities of a specific community’s attitude towards women’s role in water provision, as there can never be a one size fits all form of participatory development.

In some rural communities of West Sudan, household chores, collecting water, and small forms of productive work such as agricultural labour or petty trading, are all seen as part of a woman’s natural role and of lesser value than anything considered to be men’s work. Interestingly however, in instances where both men and women carry out a certain task, i.e. agricultural labour, the value of the work takes on a greater significance when done by males. This changing perception of the labour is shared by men and women alike, so that women largely perceive themselves as having a lower social and economic value than the men of their society. In a society where patriarchal notions are so ingrained, it is not surprising that early developmental projects by Oxfam had little success in promoting ideas of female empowerment (Strachan & Peters,1997). Despite the provision of water being indisputably a woman’s responsibility, the idea that women could take part in the development of their resource was an alien one. Part of this could have been due to the ‘time poverty’ which many women can experience when they have to devote hours each day to collecting water (Ray, 2007), but it was also down to the idea that women would only act on the behalf of the men of their community, and participation in innovative, empowering projects was not their role (Strachan& Peters, 1997). Eventually the Oxfam developers realised that simply encouraging the women to get involved in community meetings was not empowering at all, as women felt they didn’t have the status to speak up about their issues. Instead, Oxfam encouraged women to have meetings for just themselves, and discuss the ways that community water should be managed based on their unique knowledge and experience of existing community water sources. The developers initially acted as a sort of intermediary between the meetings of men and the meetings of women, however as the men saw that the women were valuable contributors to the progress of water development, the meetings merged, so that the community began to communicate as a whole instead of two halves.

In my opinion, this was an appropriate form of participatory development for the situation, and resulted in a more vocal and empowered female population. Although it did not fully break down the gendered divisions of labour within the community, it promoted an appreciation of female contributions to the community, which could result in women wanting to become more empowered further down the line.

Full female empowerment is not an overnight occurrence, nor can societal views be upgraded by outside organisations in the way that a community water supply can be. Almost two decades after this project in West Sudan took place, it would be interesting to see whether females are more valued within society, and if they have claimed a level of equality for themselves.