Simultaneously, increased water pollution is worsening the imbalance between water supply and demand. For these reasons, water resources development and irrigation are of critical importance in efforts to improve food security and sustainable agricultural production.
Women play an important role in water management.
They are most often the collectors, users and managers of water in the household as well as farmers of irrigated and rainfed crops. Because of these roles, women have considerable knowledge about water resources, including quality and reliability, restrictions and acceptable storage methods, and are key to the success of water resources development and irrigation policies and programmes. In many cases water resource policies and programmes have proven detrimental to women's water rights and, therefore, to their sustainable management and use of water. Interventions such as irrigation habitually fail to take into consideration the existing imbalance between men's and women's ownership rights, division of labour and incomes. By raising the value of the land, irrigation brings about social change which usually favours men.