4　「ジェンダー主流化」を越えて　紛争後の東ティモールにおける灌漑復旧の現場から

抄録

Ms. Ela Bhatt, founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), said in 1992, “We not only want a piece of the pie, we also want to choose the flavor, and to know how to make it ourselves.” Even today, a woman is often seen as a receiver and not a learner and decision maker. This paper shows how donors ignored their own gender mainstreaming policy in rural development projects in Timor-Leste and analyzes how women farmers can acquire capability in order to solve critical engineering problems caused by authoritarian donors and the government, which cannot challenge the donors’ intentions.

Section I presents my previous field research on the irrigation development projects in Lao PDR, in which some donors promoted women’s participation in Water Users Associations (WUA), recognizing women as stakeholders who provided substantial resources and labor for the development of irrigation systems. It was observed in 1997, two years after the UN Conference on Women was held in Beijing. This was the period when donors began to integrate the gender mainstreaming goals into their policy for assuring gender equality to be promoted in every sector/field.

Section II describes how Timorese women, through the National Congress of Women, raised their concern about the lack of access to trainings, facilities, and the decision-making process regarding farming and natural resource management including irrigation. Section III shows the results of a two-year field research that I conducted together with women farmers on the Caraulun Irrigation Rehabilitation Scheme in Manufahi district. The EC-funded project was coordinated by the World Bank. The research showed that there was no intervention on participation of women, including widows and/or female household heads, into WUA and that their most pressing problem, the irrigation system malfunction, was caused by the donors’ neglect of farmers’ requests and the design’s incompleteness, which was attributable to the donors’ erroneous cost-cutting policy. However, the women struggled to participate in the WUA and the newly elected WUA leadership stood up to raise its voice against the donors and the government.