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Understanding women’s participation in irrigated agriculture: a case study from Senegal

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Abstract

As climate change in West Africa poses profound limitations on rainfed agriculture, policymakers and practitioners may again turn to irrigated agriculture to provide food for a growing population. Gendered analyses of irrigation projects reveal that in many cases women’s participation in irrigated agriculture has been limited due to a lack of access to land and water. Past research in the Upper Valley of the Senegal River suggests that variables other than access to land and water condition women’s participation in irrigated agriculture. Fully understanding women’s participation in irrigated agriculture demands examination of intra-household dynamics and livelihood strategies as well as the impacts of agricultural commodification.

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  1. Irrigation development in the Senegal River Valley was part of a larger river basin development scheme that includes two dams: the Manantali Dam along the Bafing River (a major tributary of the Senegal) in Mali and the Diama Dam (a salt-intrusion dam) on the Senegal River in the Lower Valley. The Manantali Dam is a multi-purpose dam to improve navigation, generate hydroelectric power, and increase the amount of water for irrigation. To achieve these goals, the river’s regime must be altered, decreasing the annual flooding downstream. Farmers practicing flood recession agriculture depend on this flooding. Thus, river basin development was predicated on the view that flood recession agriculture would diminish accordingly and be replaced by irrigation, which would be enhanced by releases of water from the dam’s reservoir during the dry season. .

  2. During this time, people were particularly reluctant to discuss class and caste relations as these were changing in the Valley and were, in some cases, painful reminders of the past. As a result, I chose not to focus on these in interviews and consequently excluded these from much of my data analysis.

  3. Harris (2006) cites a similar situation with regard to the Southeastern Anatolia Project in Turkey.

  4. I calculated women’s irrigation group membership in 1990 from figures provided in SAED’s Database of Bakel Delegation PIVs. In a few cases, the only membership figures available were from Blijdorp (1987). I used both of the above sources and information in USAID (1990) to estimate the amount of land women cultivated.

  5. Since selling rice on the parallel market was considered an illegal activity, I did not directly question women about this activity. I presume that most women sold their rice on the parallel market because they sold only small quantities of rice (one bag or less), making it hardly worthwhile to deal with the bureaucratic SAED. As well, women tended to sell their peanuts through informal channels, including bartering, so I had no reason to believe that they marketed their rice any differently.

  6. Figures for yields during 1989 were gathered through interviews with women irrigators. The same women were asked: “How much rice do you harvest during good years.”

  7. At the time, $1US equaled approximately 282 CFA francs.

  8. When paddy is hulled, it loses between 15 and 20% of its weight. I have used the lesser figure of 15% in making these calculations.

  9. Unmarried teenage girls begin cultivating their own small peanut fields and assist their mothers with peanut cultivation on larger fields.

  10. A chi-square test of the difference of assistance among irrigators and non-irrigators confirmed that this assistance does vary when testing at the .05 significance level.

  11. Data on domestic work were gathered by asking each woman to state whether or not she received assistance with the domestic tasks listed. Questions specifically dealing with certain tasks, such as fuelwood gathering and water drawing, allowed for some cross-checking of responses. As with agricultural labor, children’s assistance with domestic labor is probably under-reported because it may not be perceived as “assistance” but as the child’s responsibility. However, there is no reason why under-reporting would vary enough among irrigators and non-irrigators to invalidate the results reported.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Fédération de Paysans Organisés en Zone Soninké for permitting me access to one of their member villages for this research. In particular, I am indebted to the late Adrian Adams and Diabé Sow for their support and wisdom. Many people in Senegal assisted me with this work, including my translator Diogou Bathily and my friend Astou Bathily, and I thank them for their help and friendship. Rodney White at the University of Toronto worked with me on the analysis of this research while I was a PhD student, and Christopher Boone generously gave his time to create the maps in this paper. Joseph Tainter, Alexandra Brewis Slade, and Christopher Boone read through earlier versions of the paper and made helpful comments. I also thank the three anonymous reviewers for their tremendous insights. The field research for this paper was funded through scholarships from the University of Toronto and support from Project Ecoville, an initiative of the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study.

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  1. Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 875402, Tempe, AZ, 85287-5402, USA

    Marcia L. Nation

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Nation, M.L. Understanding women’s participation in irrigated agriculture: a case study from Senegal. Agric Hum Values 27, 163–176 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9207-8

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