All messages on "Why"

All messages of the e-conference and the summary of the contributions to the question "Why is gender mainstreaming important?" can be found here.

Summary of discussion on the "whys": This summary intends to extract the major points from all contrbutions to the e-conference concerning this topic
Message 2: Freddy Miranda: Response from Freddy Miranda Castro
Message 3: Juana Vera on the Why's: Juana Vera from Peru responds to the question: "why is it important to mainstream a gender perspective in agricultural water management?”. In her response, Juana highlights the issues of gender hierarchies in access to resources as well as social differentiation created by confronting interests and status, as playing a role in inhibiting access. She also mentions the differences in the types of roles played by men and women in agriculture, and the perceptions of agriculture as being a primarily male occupation.
Message 4: Manirul on Juana: Manirul Islam reviews the comments by Juana Vera’s response in the last message. There are certain points regarding feminist approaches in development and their application to questions within agriculture and water management that are pointed out.
Message 5: Juana responds to Manirul: Juana Vera responds to the comments of Manirul Islam. She addresses Manirul’s critique of the application of feminist approaches to development in water management and also clarifies with an example.
Message 6: Gina's Contribution: Gina Castillo writes that for development projects and programmes that have a rights based focus, participation is key, and this cannot be ensured without addressing the issues that may inhibit women’s contributions. Also programmes need to understand that users are both men and women, and they each have different concerns as well as needs and requirements. Distribution of the benefits of effective water management also needs to be done more effectively if poverty reduction is a desired outcome from a particular project. The issues that make the process of gender mainstreaming harder are: exclusion from institutions; the idea that gender can be tackled after addressing the broader needs of the community; the idea of gender being about women only; and also the other forms of social differentiatation that intersect with gender and produce disadvantage in a particular context.
Message 7: Violet's response: Violet Matiru writes that the defined roles played by men and women in a particular context do not always represent the actual distribution of responsibilities and work between men and women in that context. This means that women’s labour is often essential in productive activities in agriculture. When gender is ignored, it results in the needs of one group suffering. She also points out that people in water management are not sure about why gender should be integrated into their projects, particularly when they are involved in implementing infrastructure.
Messag 8: Manirul comments: Manirul Islam has sent some references on the concepts of ‘gender’ and ‘gender equality’ in development literature.
Message 9: Ruth Meinzen Dick: Responses by Ruth Meinzen-Dick can be found here. Ruth mentions that it is important to mainstream gender in order to look at the “water-related needs” of both men and women. She also links it to the distribution and access to water, as an asset and a resource. The barriers to gender mainstreaming arise due to a more narrow sectoral or discipline-based approach to water management and agriculture, and also the perception of agriculture as a male domain.
Message 10: Margreet Zwarteveen: Response from Margreet Zwartveen
Message 11: Pay Dreschel: Read here, a response from Pay Drechsel. Pay sees the main issues that challenge the integration of gender concerns into water management and agriculture as stemming from its marginalization on university curricula particularly in the technical fields.
Message 12: Umarukhunova Gulbakhor: Umarakhunova Gulbakhor highlights the significance of women’s productive roles in rural development citing several examples, and stresses on the relationship between, obstacles to rights and access to property, and poverty. Read her response.
Message 13: Jaime Hoogesteger: In this response Jaime Hoogesteger points out that the relevance of gender mainstreaming to water management arises due to the impact of such activities on social structures. Interventions in water management thus have the ability to change systems by virtue of the fact that various stakeholders have to be involved. And this is where the potential to change these existing orders and structures lies.
Message 14: Surapol Chandrapatya: Suraphol Chandrapatya provides some cases from experiences working as a project leader for the "ASIALAND Network: Management of sloping lands for sustainable agriculture project" during 2001-2004. They revealed that lower participation from female farmers in meetings and workshops arose due to their other commitments to their families.
Message 15: Jorge Mora Portuguez: Jorge Mora Portuguez highlights below, that equity is one of the most important reasons for gender mainstreaming in water management, also land rights issues are a serious concern for poor women farmers in developing countries. He also mentions, in line with the message by Pay Dechsel (message 11) that technicians are lacking valuable training on social issues, gender included.
Message 16: Juana Vera with examples: Juana Vera responds to the messages of Gina Castillo (message 6) and Violet Matiru (message 7).
Message 17: A.K. Mishra: The response from A. K Mishra addresses the larger presence of men in more formal training workshops in comparison to the informal gatherings and network channels through which women acquire information. Men and women also work at different levels in water management, or on different aspects, productive/domestic, which can also be linked to differentials in participation in institutions.
Message 18: Barbara van Koppen: A response from Barbara Van Koppen
Message 19: Fatiha Bou-Salah: Fatiha Bou-Salah responds
Message 20: Don Peden: Don Peden provides some interesting insights on the connections between livestock and water management, their combined effects on gender relations.
Message 21: Max Finlayson: Max Finlayson agrees with Pay Drechsel’s comments on the insufficient exposure to the social sciences in more technical fields, and asks for references of material that could address these gaps.
Message 22: Iskandar Abdullaev: Iskandar Abdullaev’s response address the issue of institutional exclusion of women and gender concerns in water management. This also includes their access to valuable services such as credit, and there is a link between this and the extent to which women are over represented in the lower skilled, labour intensive work in agriculture. Iskander illustrates with examples from Central Asia.
Message 23: Elizabeth Zachariah: Elizabeth Zachariah responds referring to the lack of commitment to gender issues in projects as an important issue that challenges gender mainstreaming in water management for agriculture.
Message 24: Patricia Kabatabazi: Patricia Kabatabazi highlights that inadequate analysis of stakeholders is one of the main issues that challenge the integration of gender concerns into water management for agriculture.
Message 25: Mary Njenga: Mary Njenga responds mentioning that there is often a gender dimension to the design of water regimes, and the implementation, where women and children are most often required to carry out the work. Like Patricia Kabatabazi (message 24) she also sees that stakeholder analysis needs to take into consideration who performs which activities while being sensitive to the gender categories in various types of work in a particular region.
Message 26: Deepa Joshi: Deepa Joshi separates the two main issues that emerge so far out of the discussion on gender mainstreaming as: 1. “The technical aspects of integrating gender in organisational policies, programmes and projects and” 2. “The transformative agenda which calls for a redistribution of power, resources and opportunities in favour of the marginalised” The latter of the two points is often the more challenging and extends to the larger goal of social justice.
Message 27: Barbara Schreiner: Barbara Schreiner shares an experience from the Policy and Regulation Department of Water Affairs and Forestry South Africa, where they are training senior managers in policy and regulation on gender mainstreaming.
Message 28: Lakech Haile: Lakech Haile writes that one of the reasons for why gender has not been mainstreamed in water management is because existing guidelines are not culturally sensitive, and they are difficult to put into practice because of the range of institutional arrangements in various countries.
Message 29: Gina Castillo: Gina Castillo reacts to the claim’s that women’s contributions in agriculture are ‘invisible’.
Message 30: Dorothy Hamada: Dorothy Hamada writes that one of the issues in gender mainstreaming is the fact that the divisions/and creation of categories such as: “small-scale/large scale, economic-commercial versus the subsistence-production for household consumption..etc.”, and their correlation with gender roles are sometimes perpetuated when we attempt to show the extent of women’s participation in agriculture in monetary contributions through their labour.
Message 31: Ruth Meinzen Dick: Ruth Meinzen-Dick shares findings from a workshop on gender and collective action held by the CGIAR System-wide Program on Property Rights and Collective Action (CAPRi), which examined cases on the effectiveness of local institutions based on their gender compositions.
Message 32: Manirul Islam: Manirul Islam points that sometimes when development initiatives gender mainstream to increase women’s participation in productive activities, they put pressure on women by increasing their workloads. These initiatives need to keep in mind that the balance of reproductive work with involvement in such programmes is still done by the women themselves, and often the consequences are that women are overburdened and time-poor.
Message 33: Chicu Lokgariwar: Response from Chicu Lokgariwar
Message 34: Priscilla M Achakpa: Priscilla M Achakpa writes that the under-representation of women in positions of authority in water management is one of the reasons for the fact that gender mainstreaming is such a challenge
Message 35: Ango Patrice Effebi: Ango Patrice Effebi writes that lack of women decision making roles is one of reasons for gender not being mainstreamed in water management for agriculture.
Message 36: Helvi Heinonen-Tanski: Helvi Heinonen-Tanski responds saying that more water is required for women’s household cultivation.
Message 37: Shiney Varghese: Contribution by Shiney Varghese