"Capacity Building" as Key to Gender Integration

This week, I will be exploring the importance of “capacity building” in optimising the impact of water initiatives. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term, I provide a general definition below taken from ‘The Africa Water Page’:

"Capacity building is the process whereby a community equips itself to undertake the necessary functions of governance and service provision in a sustainable fashion. The process of capacity building must be aimed at both increasing access to resources and to changing the power relationships between the parties involved. Capacity building is not only constrained to officials and technicians but must also include the general awareness of the local population regarding their services and development in general."

The chart above shows the different components involved in the process of "capacity-building" and how these can be measured using a threshold (or benchmark). 

In general, most government-funded water projects which include some element of training often target water resources specialists - very few programmes are actually aimed at educating communities about how to best manage their water supply. This has especially significant consequences for women; who are the main managers of water supply in the household. In my opinion, every technology-driven water and sanitation initiative should also come hand in hand with community-based schemes in order to ensure its sustainability.

In her paper for the Women for Water Partnership, Prabha Khosla contends that what makes capacity-building in the water sector different is the need for initiatives that focus on both women and men, as well as women-only constituencies. She argues this will also require trainers that are engaged with the notion of gender equality and women empowerment and applauds approaches articulated in Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) which specifically include gender analysis. She expressed the need for water organisations to hire gender specialists as part of their core staff - this would allow for capacity-building on gender to be perceived as an ongoing programme and not a one-time activity.

On the more practical level, there has been an increasing number of initiatives which have made an effort to integrate the community in water and sanitation programmes. An example is the Ghana Rural Water Project (Poku Sam, 2006), which aimed to address a serious infestation of guinea worm and poor access to potable drinking water. The project, which was initially technology-driven and externally sourced, was then adapted to include a more demand sensitive approach and was rated as having a high community involvement. The fact that village members, and especially women, were more aware of how the new water facilities worked as well as being able to have a say in the development of the project contributed to gender integration in the community. Moreover, the project has also lead to an increase in the education of girls in the community mostly owing to the hygiene and sanitation training they received as part of the initiative.