Where to Begin - Improving Physical Access to Water

One of the major factors, if not the main one, of achieving gender equality and promoting sustainable development goals is improving the physical access to safe water. 

In most African countries, women are the primary collectors, users and managers of household water - often having to travel far to search for water for household use. Hence, an improvement in access to water will allow women, as well as girls, to devote more time to their personal and “professional” pursuits - whether this is simply going to school or being involved in water and sanitation management projects. 

Despite their role and contribution to the management of water, women are often very minimally involved in the drafting of water-related projects. Although the overall objective is to involve women in all stages of the process, when focusing on increasing the physical access to water, there is a specific need of the involvement of women in the design-stage of the project. 

An example where this was largely overlooked is given by Grafton et al, in ‘Water Resources and Planning Management’, where women in rural villages in Nepal complained that their water collection time increased nearly four or five times after they received improved water services. This was mainly owing to the fact that the tap-stands were placed alongside a main road, which meant they could not bathe freely or comfortably wash their clothes used during menstruation for shame of being seen by males. In order to overcome this situation, women had to carry water all the way to their households several times a day - 3 villages even reported waiting until dark to collect the water. All of this would have been avoided if women had been initially involved in designing the tap-stands. 

The benefits of having an accessible source of water supply are immense, as is shown in the video below: 

The video highlights the benefits of a recent installation of a water point (financed by UNICEF) in a rural village in Somalia. The advantages of such an initiative can be summarised under four areas:

• Gender roles: women have more hours per day to use more productively on their farms, in their households and for other activities;
• Education: enrollment of girls in primary/secondary schools has increased relative to boys; 
• Access to water: farming practices have improved due to reliable access to water; and
• Health and hygiene: waterborne diseases such as diarrhoea have significantly declined.

As can be seen, providing physically accessible clean water is essential for empowering women and girls and pushing gender equality forward. 

Gender Mainstreaming at the Policy-Level

Following on from my previous post, I have decided to adopt a “top-down” approach to the issue. In other words, I will start by looking at “gender mainstreaming” at the policy level and will then go on to explore case studies/media pieces which illustrate how these best-practice policies are being effectively implemented at the local scale (or not in some cases…). 

The importance and value of including both men and women in the overall management of water and sanitation supplies has been at the forefront of public policy debate since the 1970s, when the UN hosted its Water Conference at Mar del Plata.

This was duly followed by the International Drinking Water and Sanitation Decade (1981-90) and the International Conference on Water and Environment in Dublin (1992), alongside numerous references in implementation plans and resolutions such as Agenda 211.

Arguably the most important resolution, or at least the most publicised one, was the UN’s Water for Life Decade (2005-2015) which appeals to the involvement of women in water-related development efforts and coincided with the Millennium Development Goals - more on this in the chart below). 

More recent (and exciting) trends include a rise in the number of women appointed as water ministers, including H.E. Maria Mutagamba, Minister of State for Water of Uganda, and currently the chair of the African Ministerial Council on Water. 

Although in my previous post I mentioned that there is the need to look at both sides of the equation, meaning how gender equality impacts access to water/improved sanitation and vice-versa, it is actually more than often the case that showing how water projects improve with the involvement of women has a greater effect in terms of financing than illustrating how access to water contributes to gender equality.

The Water and Sanitation Program, which is administered by the World Bank, identifies the following indicators of best-practice “gender-mainstreaming”:

• The existence of gender specific objectives within national and sector level policies.
• The existence of gender policies within agencies involved in sector development.
• Water and sanitation equity distribution ratios and percentage of population on-network vs. off-network
• Proportion of income spent by women and men in accessing water and sanitation services 

In the coming weeks, I will be applying these indicators to case studies of water and sanitation initiatives in Africa. I will use them as a means of evaluating the extent to which they have been effective in promoting gender equality by making the concerns and experiences of women, as well as men, an integral dimension of all stages of the projects. 

Intro

Throughout the course of the coming weeks, I will be exploring the immensely complex topic that is gender and the provision of safe water supplies and sanitation. 

I thought that, in this first blog post, I would attempt to convey my initial “brainstorming” ideas on the main challenges of addressing the relationship between gender and water supply. 

I have to confess that my initial response to the chosen blog title was to, almost automatically, assume that I would be focusing on the female gender specifically. This is intrinsically justified by reasons such as how, in developing countries, women are the ones often responsible for providing water for their household as well as being involved in the collection process. However, having thought about the topic a little deeper, I realised the need to not only focus our attention on women, but to actually understand the implications for both gender roles, and how these are influenced by economic, social, political and cultural realities. 

This blog will also attempt to address both sides of the relationship - i.e.: not only how inherent gender inequality leads to differences in the level of access to water, but also how the lack of safe water supplies and sanitation exacerbates differences between genders and the impact this has on Africa’s overall development. 

In the posts to come, I will start by looking at academic research to provide context on the extent of the issue, from the concept of “gender mainstreaming to UN’s ‘Water for Life’ initiative. Then, I shall research what is being done (and has been done in the past) in practice about the topic, and the difficulties with these policies; keeping up to date with any current news or debates in the meanwhile. Although, by the end, the blog might not have reached a definitive conclusion, I hope to have been able to share a light on the issue - which is more than often a contentious one in the socio-political realm - and provide some potential solutions.