South Africa: Women Farmers in South Africa Pay the Cost of Broken Irrigation Systems – The Story of One Cooperative

Mar 5, 2026 | Khulekani T. Dlamini
The Conversation
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The South African government makes a great deal of the fact that it supports women’s empowerment in agriculture.

But does it?

As an anthropologist, I’ve been engaged in long-term ethnographic research in KwaZulu-Natal since 2007, focusing mostly on rural food systems and food-based livelihoods and before that on health care.

We conducted research into the Isibonelo Cooperative, a small-scale women-led farming cooperative in KwaZulu-Natal. We found that weak governance and old infrastructure had led to women’s dispossession from the land they had farmed for decades.

This isn’t happening through formal dispossession, but because failing irrigation infrastructure is making farming impossible. Old and damaged equipment, high operating costs, and institutional barriers interact to limit the viability of smallholder farming on South Africa’s smallholder irrigation schemes.