Economic inclusion of women as a driver of the project

In the Saïss plain, agriculture shapes incomes, employment and social balances. Women are omnipresent. They work on family farms, in orchards, in market gardening and in cooperatives. They contribute to production and to the economic survival of households. Yet this contribution remains largely invisible from an economic perspective.
Few women have access to land ownership. Few run farms. Few directly benefit from support schemes, financing or agricultural advisory services. The hydro-agricultural development project for the Saïss takes this observation as its starting point. It does not treat it as a secondary issue, but as a central challenge for social sustainability.

The project’s gender approach therefore pursues a clear objective: turning women’s participation in agriculture into genuine economic opportunities.

Why a gender approach?

Improving irrigation profoundly changes production conditions. It secures water access. It opens the way to higher-value crops. It encourages investment. Without specific support, however, these changes may primarily benefit those actors who are already in the strongest position.
In the Saïss:

• a large share of farms are small-scale or family-run;
• women work there, often without formal status;
• their access to information, financing and markets remains limited;
• female agricultural entrepreneurship exists, but remains fragile and insufficiently structured.

Integrating a gender perspective means preventing agricultural modernization from widening existing disparities. It also means recognizing that the economic potential of rural women remains underused, even though the territory needs it to strengthen its resilience.

An approach grounded in field realities

The project does not start from a theoretical model. It is based on a precise diagnosis of the situations experienced by rural women in the Saïss.
Several profiles are concerned:

• family helpers, highly active but without economic autonomy;
• women farm heads, still a minority and faced with multiple obstacles;
• women’s cooperatives, often focused on low value-added activities;
• women project holders, held back by access to land, credit or networks.

These profiles face clearly identified barriers: social constraints, mobility difficulties, lack of management skills, limited access to financing, and weak commercial outlets. The project’s gender approach aims precisely to address these barriers.

Supporting women’s access to economic opportunities

The gender approach is based on practical support for women’s agricultural entrepreneurship. In this context, the project provides for:

• support for the creation and development of women-led agricultural enterprises;
• strengthening women’s cooperatives beyond subsistence activities;
• supporting informal activities towards more structured forms;
• linking women with existing financing and support mechanisms.

The objective is simple: to enable women to move from a role of execution to that of full-fledged economic actors.

A choice for social sustainability

Supporting women’s entrepreneurship is not an isolated objective. It is a condition for:

• improving the incomes of agricultural households;
• strengthening the project’s local anchorage;
• limiting economic vulnerability in the face of climate risks;
• encouraging lasting ownership of new irrigation practices.

By integrating women into the project’s economic dynamic, the gender approach contributes to a more balanced development of the Saïss plain. A development that relies on water resources, but also on the women and men who give life to this territory.