ABSTRACT
Despite decades of agricultural research and development efforts, the challenges of poverty and gender disparities in access to resources, markets and technologies, are still persisting. ‘This persistence highlights that existing approaches to integrating gender into agricultural research don’t go far enough. Many approaches aim to close gender gaps without understanding or addressing their causes’, Kantor (cited in Holmes 2012) explains.The persistence of poverty, hunger and gender inequality calls for a change in the way we integrate gender in agricultural research and development.This is because conventional efforts that fill gender gaps, but do not address the underlying causes of existing inequalities, are not sufficient. Accordingly, there is a call for transformative interventions that address the social norms and power relations causing disparities in access to resources.This is along with markets and technologies, innovative organizational processes and activities that ensure gender research as standard practice in agricultural research and development (WFC 2012). This research is a reply to that call. It is research which harbors exemplary case
studies that report the data in a way that transforms a complex issue into one that can be easily understood. It adopts a social relational approach that involves placing women and men in their wider social settings, not only their households, but also their community and portrays how rigid structures impinge on the gender activities, as well as the factors affecting these. The paper explains how the case study method was used and then applies the
method designed to various households in the rural commune of Boudinar, Morocco, to examine why women are more vulnerable in agriculture and examines how external factors influence this gender relationship. This report is a narrative description of case studies presented to showcase the uniqueness and complexities of the context. The paper is composed of five main sections.The first section is the introduction
and covers the basic overview of the problem to be discussed, states the research
questions guiding this work and their importance and development implications and ends with a brief description of the study group.The second section describes and justifies why the case study method was chosen as the approach and presents the five main steps adopted to carry out this work. Section three portrays the actual four case studies, each as a story, which presents the concrete narrative detail of the actual living conditions of men and women in Boudinar. It is descriptive in nature and attempts to give as much context as possible.The section is composed to handle each case as a separate case study or a story and treats each case as a chronological recounting. Section five presents the discussion and starts with the explanations of how the findings compare with other findings in the literature and whether the results confirm previous results or create a new understanding of the problem and ends with the way forward, presenting new, emerging questions. The fundamental research questions in this study that will address the root
causes of the existing gender inequalities, as described in the background, follow the general principles of the case study research questions which begin with ‘how’ or ‘why’.They are as follows: The first research question is: why are women more vulnerable? This led to the
interview questions: 1)What are the gender division of roles and responsibilities in water management from the different sources? And 2) what are men’s and women’s access to and control over resources? The second research question is: do external factors such as climate change
impact on women’s livelihoods and gender relations in water management in agriculture?The following interview questions were: 1) what are the effects of changes in climate and water on gender relations? And 2) what are the adaptation strategies of the family? Accordingly, the research questions conforming to the cases study principles of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ were used, as they enable the understanding and indeed challenge the root causes of gender inequality. In this sense this study is not a conventional research effort that addresses the consequences of gender equality. Its developmental implications lie in its attempt to improve gender equity, by revealing that it is the challenges ingrained in societal beliefs that limit what women can and cannot do or the assets they can and cannot hold. It thus contributes to the record to close the gender gap with consequent opportunities to sustain agricultural productivity.Thus this research should be understood in the context of the wider call for a transformational approach to gender.
