Understanding the pathways to women’s empowerment in Northern Ghana and the relationship with small-scale irrigation

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dc.contributor.authorBryan, Elizabeth
dc.contributor.authorGarner, Elisabeth
dc.date.accessioned2023-10-13T05:41:28Z
dc.date.available2023-10-13T05:41:28Z
dc.date.issued2022-01-17
dc.description© The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Version of Scholarly Record of this Article is published in Agriculture and Human Values, 2022, available online at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-021-10291-1 . Keywords: women's empowerment; qualitative research; small-scale irrigation; Ghana; Africa.
dc.description.abstractWomen’s empowerment is often an important goal of development interventions. This paper explores local perceptions of empowerment in the Upper East Region of Ghana and the pathways through which small-scale irrigation intervention targeted to men and women farmers contributes to women’s empowerment. Using qualitative data collected with 144 farmers and traders through 28 individual interviews and 16 focus group discussions, this paper innovates a framework to integrate the linkages between small-scale irrigation and three dimensions of women’s empowerment: resources, agency, and achievements. The relationship between the components of empowerment and small-scale irrigation are placed within a larger context of social change underlying these relationships. This shows that many women face serious constraints to participating in and benefitting from small-scale irrigation, including difficulties accessing land and water and gender norms that limit women’s ability to control farm assets. Despite these constraints, many women do benefit from participating in irrigated farming activities leading to an increase in their agency and well-being achievements. For some women, these benefits are indirect—these women allocate their time to more preferred activities when the household gains access to modern irrigation technology. The result is a new approach to understanding women’s empowerment in relation to irrigation technology.
dc.description.sponsorshipAcknowledgements: This research was carried out with support from the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2), under the umbrella of the CGIAR Research Programs on Water, Land, and Ecosystems (WLE) and Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH). It builds on additional work done under the Innovation Lab for Small-Scale Irrigation funded by USAID’s Feed the Future Program. The authors wish to thank the researchers on the GAAP2 team that developed the protocols for data collection, as well as the researchers and support staff involved in collecting these data in July/August 2017. Data collection would not have been possible without Desmond Yesseh, iDE Tamale, who organized the field team and led community outreach efforts; Ali Salifu, consultant to iDE and main community organizer for the research and provided translation services; consultants Gladys Ayeebo and Nathan Aduko who facilitated focus group discussions and provided translation services for life history and market trader interviews; and Iddrisu Fatawu, who provided transportation for the field team. Thanks to Gloria and Gerald Yiran for carefully transcribing and translating the interviews and focus groups. Thanks also to Claudia Ringler, Dawit Mekonnen, Emily Myers, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, and Deborah Rubin for providing very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We are also extremely grateful to the participants in this research for sharing their time and insights with us. Funding was provided by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grant no. INV-008977) and United States Agency for International Development (Grant no. EEM-G-00-04-00013-00).
dc.identifier.citationBryan, E., Garner, E. Understanding the pathways to women’s empowerment in Northern Ghana and the relationship with small-scale irrigation. Agric Hum Values 39, 905–920 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10291-1
dc.identifier.otherhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10291-1
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14096/446
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherSpringer Nature
dc.titleUnderstanding the pathways to women’s empowerment in Northern Ghana and the relationship with small-scale irrigation
dc.typeArticle

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