Women’s Increased Access to Water Resources and Agricultural Markets

Status: On-going
Start Date: Oct 2019
End Date: Sep 2021
Geographic Coverage: 3 Districts in Sindh
Focus Area: Women Economic Empowerment
SDG Goal: 5 Achieve Gender Equality and Empower all Women and Girls
Implementing Partner: SPO
Funding Partner: Embassy of Kingdom of Netherlands

SPO is implementing ‘Women’s Increased Access to Water Resources and Agricultural Markets’ a project that builds on the social empowerment processes initiated under “Women and Marginalized Groups, Natural Resource Management and Peace-building: Unlocking the Potential Strategic Partnership Project” and seeks to adopt an integrated approach in the target areas to strengthen all the key dimensions of women’s empowerment – social, economic and political. The project also aligns with SDG goal 15 which demands to achieve gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls.

The project’s immediate objective is:

1. Improved role of women in water resource management to enhance their incomes and to enable them to effectively participate and contribute to decision-making in domestic and public spheres.

Located within the women’s empowerment realm, the project aims to execute the following strategies:

• Deepen and broaden the process of social mobilization to cover 500 women organized in three districts in 20 self-help groups and further grouped at cluster and District levels.

• Expand economic opportunities and choices of the selected 150 small landholder women, 100 landless sharecroppers, 200 women in Livestock rearing and 50 Bagri women through agro-enterprise development that leads to sustainable increase in their household incomes and enables them to play an enhanced and strategic role in the economic sphere.

• Enhancing political participation and representation of women in Water Course Associations so that they contribute effectively in local decision-making regarding water resource management.

The program envisages working with three cohorts of women, small landholder women, and landless sharecroppers and livestock owners in the Badin, Tando Allahyar and Hyderabad Districts of Sindh. It aims to strengthen women’s social, economic and political empowerment by applying an integrated approach. It will demonstrate sustainable models of women’s empowerment by strengthening their technical, institutional, managerial and financial literacy skills so that women are able to play a larger role in the social and economic development of their villages. Simultaneously, it will strengthen women’s participation and leadership in political processes and local decision-making bodies by building the capacity of the women in the area of the gender sensitive approaches, peace building, Water Course Management, Judicious usage of Water for tail end users.

The Project seeks to bring about sustained improvement in the quality of life of the rural women in Sindh by diversifying livelihood opportunities and strengthening low-income rural markets, which can also contribute towards the national development goals of inclusive economic growth, and poverty alleviation. Rural women face multiple challenges, which include lack of access to financial resources, inadequate managerial and technical skills, and little access to market information, high levels of vulnerabilities to disasters and crisis and an inhibitive regulatory environment. In these circumstances, the Project intends to create economic choices for these rural women through a combination of efforts to build rural assets and skills for the poor rural women and help them to diversify their income generating activities by stimulating engagement not only in value addition to rural products but also in non-farm production and services that provide additional employment and income opportunities.