The increased availability of wells, subsistence crops, and fodder has reduced women’s household labor significantly in Darewadi. Women are typically the chief providers of their families’ water, food, fodder, and fuel needs. Women also earned cash as project laborers and have benefited from drudgery-reducing assets made possible by increased incomes, such as kitchen gardens and household toilets (Lobo and D’Souza 2003:16).

However, as work on watershed activities is almost yearround, compared with the seasonal nature of farming duties, many women now work longer hours than before the project. According to Crispino Lobo, “women accept this load because it gives them additional income, which enables them to send their children to school.” Becoming breadwinners, he says, also “enhances their status at home.”

Empowering women, however, has proved more difficult than improving their material well-being. Faced with traditional rural attitudes about women’s subservient roles, the Watershed Organization Trust has taken a soft approach. While strongly urging village assemblies to elect women to Village Watershed Committees, they have not insisted on a 50:50 ratio (D’Souza and Lobo 2004:11). As a result, women generally number no more than one-third of Watershed Committee members in IGWDP projects (Lobo 2005a).

To encourage greater self-confidence and independence, WOTR also trains village women in record-keeping and organizational skills, and encourages them to form savings and credit groups. Darewadi village and its surrounding hamlets now boast eleven such groups as well as an umbrella women’s organization, the Samyukta Mahila Samiti (WOTR 2002:3). The women give each other small loans to support basic needs. Bigger loans—for example, to launch Darewadi’s women-run dairy—are available through microfinance arranged by WOTR (Lobo and D’Souza 2003:20).