Women have traditionally played an important role in almost all agriculture and livestock activities of the farm. They also have a key role in securing the household food and water availability through fetching and collecting water and water rational use at farm and household level. However, women participation in water resource management is still hampered by their lack of decision-making power.
It is necessary to establish a special knowledge base related to this issue. It is equally necessary that the knowledge base exists not only as a specialized, vertical thematic, but as a common, horizontal case of study into all information management and knowledge generation activities. These activities connect to the gender dimension as an important element in Integrated Participatory Water Management (IPWM), and ensure the interests and need of women as well as men. In the Mediterranean countries, particularly in the developing ones, we are still in need of a hard work and great efforts to bridge the gap between women and men in order to bring women into the mainstream of the decision making processes, and the creation of this knowledge base will be very useful towards achieving this objective.
The growing momentum of women entrepreneurs and their contribution to the GDP have proved in most countries on the Mediterranean to be a driving force in supporting the emerging of the region’s economy. The MELIA project has created a debate around an analysis of the factors, the organizational structures and the legal frameworks that can confer to IPWM and gender-dimension implementation.
