Women’s empowerment, land and donor-driven agricultural interventions in Eastern Zambia

Nowadays Western development agencies invariably include gender in their programme and project designs, primarily to promote women empowerment. However, empirical evidence seems to suggest otherwise. We use case studies from conservation agriculture and cotton production supported by Norwegian and Chinese development aid to answer the two research questions: (i) To what extent do rural Zambian women feel empowered? (ii) Is gender mainstreaming in development aid modalities a panacea for women empowerment in agricultural development interventions in Zambia? A household survey was conducted with 235 randomly selected households between October and November 2015. Of these households, 159 and 76 were participating in Norwegian and Chinese intervention projects, respectively. The survey was later complemented by six focus group discussions (FGDs) and 12 key informant interviews in August 2016. A triple-stream approach for focus discussions was used i.e., women-only FGDs, men-only FGDs and FGDs with both women and men. We find that despite differences in project modalities, with the Chinese aid programme not having any explicit women empowerment goals while the Norwegian programmes claimed to mainstream gender, both modalities resulted in increased access and control over productive resources by women farmers. We conclude that gender mainstreaming in development aid programme and project design may not be a panacea for women empowerment and that interventions that do not demand any capital outlay from smallholders are more likely to engender women empowerment than those that do. It appears that women empowerment may take place as much as an indirect consequence of interventions as a consequence of interventions specifically addressing gender equality. It may also be the result of broader societal changes.