Over 1,300 Jordanians Benefit from Al-Murunah+ Programme as Shared Household Decision-Making Builds Climate Resilience

October 4, 2026 — More than 1,300 Jordanians have benefited from the Al-Murunah+ programme, with IWMI regional researcher Sawsan Gharaibeh reflecting on how households in which couples share decision-making are better able to cope with water scarcity and the pressures of daily life amid Jordan’s mounting climate and resource pressures.

Background

Al Murunah — meaning “flexibility” in Arabic — is a regional climate resilience and adaptation project funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and implemented by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) across Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The Middle East and North Africa region is one of the most water-scarce in the world, with agriculture accounting for roughly 65 percent of total water use — a challenge compounded by land degradation and intensifying climate impacts.

Al Murunah+ builds on the original project’s focus on resilient nature-based water solutions by adding a gender-transformative component centered on household dynamics alongside community-level interventions. The approach is grounded in a straightforward but often overlooked insight: many natural resource management interventions focus on biophysical and economic gaps but fall short because they leave underlying social dynamics untouched. In many participating communities, women have historically been excluded from financial decision-making and economic participation, limiting how entire families could respond to climate-related stress.

Working Directly with Couples

Rather than treating gender as a secondary consideration, Al Murunah+ integrates household dialogue sessions, community leadership engagement, and climate-smart agricultural interventions to address the gender norms shaping access to water, livelihoods and decision-making. Couples participate in weekly sessions covering resilience, budgeting, shared decision-making and resource management, while community leaders are separately engaged to promote gender-responsive agricultural practices and women’s participation in water governance structures.

Sawsan Gharaibeh, IWMI’s Regional Researcher for Gender and Social Inclusion and Al Murunah+’s gender lead, has described this work as recognizing that power relations and decisions between spouses about income, assets and resources ultimately determine whether water and climate-resilience investments deliver equitable, lasting benefits. She has emphasized the importance of bridging the gap between women’s real contributions to household and agricultural livelihoods and the recognition they actually receive within their families and communities.

Baseline Findings and Ongoing Challenges

A baseline evaluation of Al Murunah+ in Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine, led by Alix Clark of SDDirect, found that household resilience was generally low across participating communities due to overlapping pressures, including conflict, economic crises, drought and water scarcity. Findings from the programme have also indicated that gender-based violence continues to be a key barrier to women’s participation in sustainable agriculture and water management — prompting Al Murunah+ to partner with the “What Works to Prevent Violence: Impact at Scale” initiative to integrate a violence-prevention component working directly with couples and local opinion leaders, developed together with technical advisers and local women’s rights organisations.

Conclusion

As Al Murunah+ surpasses 1,300 Jordanian beneficiaries, the programme’s core finding — that households where couples share decision-making cope better with water scarcity and daily pressures — points to a broader lesson for climate resilience programming across the region: that lasting water security cannot be built through infrastructure and nature-based solutions alone, but requires deliberately addressing the household-level power dynamics that shape whether those investments translate into real, equitable resilience for entire families.