Providing farmland ownership rights to women in rural Mali : the MCC experience
Rolfes, Leonard
From 2007 to 2012, the Government of Mali implemented the Alatona Irrigation Project, which converted almost 5,000 hectares of Sahel scrubland into high-value irrigated farmland. The project, an integrated agricultural development effort to permanently reduce poverty in the Alatona area and increase the countryys food supply, was financed by the U.S. Governmentts Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). One of the projectts key components was its land allocation activity, through which the irrigated land was transferred from the state to beneficiary families. Founded in 2004, MCC has developed as an agency in a time when gender equality has been a policy priority. During this time, MCC has worked to learn, innovate and improve on its approach to gender equality in the context of its mission, poverty reduction through growth. This was also true of how gender equality was integrated into the Alatona Irrigation Projectts land allocation activity. The development and allocation of highvalue irrigated land offered a significant economic opportunity to women as well as men, yet, there were significant challenges to including women. The rural, traditional Muslim social structures embedded in a semi-pastoralist way of life in the Alatona project area, coupled with low education levels of women and men in the area, would make inclusion of women as project beneficiaries a challenging endeavor.
Event: Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty 2013
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