Water Scarcity and Gender Disparities: Part Two

-
At the end of my last blog post, I wrote about how a gendered approach to water resource issues has been highlighted by various sources. In this blog, I want to closely explore the issue of water collection labour focusing on recent studies produced about Sub-Saharan Africa, then more closely looking at a case study from Senegal and the impacts for women and girls. Water collection labour is disproportionally a female issue that affects their health, livelihoods and education. Communities that have access to private taps from piped systems have increased time for productive water use which benefits their livelihoods and economic status (Van Houweling, 2012). 



 A recent study which collected data from 24 Sub-Saharan countries estimated that around 14 million women and 3.5 million female children were spending over 30 minutes a day collecting water (Graham et al., 2016). There were also male children reported to collect water, but it was estimated that the split amongst children was 62% female to 38% male. These numbers reflect how large of a problem water collection labour is in Sub-Saharan Africa. Many communities don’t have access to a piped water system, therefore have to travel to local springs or other unsafe water resources. Moreover, this study reflects the importance of taking a gendered approach to the issue of water collection labour. The impacts for women not only include long term health risks of carrying heavy loads but also the risk of disease but arguably most important is the time lost from their day in order to collect the water (Van Howeling, 2012). 

 The study also found that in Ethiopia there were 1.4 million children spending over 30 minutes a day collection water which was the highest of all the countries surveyed (Graham et al., 2016). These figures are so high as Ethiopia suffers from extremely variant inter-annual rainfall and high levels of poverty. In rural areas of Ethiopia, 64% of households are reliant on springs or surface water, with journeys that soar up to 9 hours a day in the dry season (Tucker et al., 2014). Such long distances mean that women will more likely choose nearer unsafe sources of water over more distance protected schemes. Reducing the time, it takes to collect water is a key development policy as well as trying to introduce safe piped water systems. For children collecting water often takes away from the time they spend in school or learning. A study in Tanzania reported that reducing the time from 30 minutes to 15 minutes for female children to collect water increased their school attendance by 12% (UNICEF, 2020). 

 After reading a case study from Senegal about productive water use for women it became clear the barriers that water collection presents for women across Sub-Saharan Africa. The study comprised of 1860 household surveys and 15 women’s focus groups across four rural regions of Senegal. All the participants had access to water systems varying from boreholes and water towers to small-scale distribution systems with public and private taps (Van Houweling, 2012). It found that the median roundtrip to collect water was 33 minutes during the wet season and 43 minutes during the dry season. Although the main finding was that women saving time collecting water and having access to piped water systems mean that they could diversify and expand their livelihoods (Van Houweling, 2012). In the focus groups women explained that before piped systems there was little time during the day to do anything other than collecting water and carrying out domestic chores whereas now, they had free time to fill with productive activities such as agriculture, livestock raising and gardening. The role of productive water use from women is typically misjudged in practice and water supply systems are built only to meet basic and domestic needs. Multi-use systems, also known as domestic plus water systems, where women can use water for productive use too as far more empowering and gender-equitable (Van Koppen et al., 2009). On top of this, in the survey, it is suspected that women’s productive water use activities were under reported due to male head of households mainly responding to the survey and women’s tendency to hide their personal and smaller income streams (Van Houweling, 2012). 

 Overall the importance of providing communities across Sub-Saharan Africa with safe multi-use piped water systems is key for the development process or these communities to enable them to grow and diversify their productive activities.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Water Scarcity and Gender Disparities: The Case of Women

-
Image
Following my first blog post, I want to dive into the specific issues of water availability in Africa and look at how this links to the gender disparities in water. I will focus on the link of water scarcity and water collection labour, due to that fact that water collection is often the responsibility of women and children (Graham et al., 2016) .  Image of Lake Victoria (Source) In the 21st century, there are many factors contributing to the availability of water resources. Firstly, population growth across the world has meant that the demand for water resources has increased as there are more mouths to feed. The African population has increased by an estimated 50% in the last 20 years, this creates dramatic increases in water demand especially in urban areas. On top of this, this century has seen major climatic changes occur. In Africa, climate change is having disproportionate effects on the availability of water. This means that already inconsistent precipitation events throughout
Read more

Water and Gender: An Introduction

-
Image
Interactions between social systems and ecosystems, or people and the environment, can be referred to as Human Ecology. This relationship linking human behaviour and the natural world is often critiqued through development challenges. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) presents many of these development challenges and aims to create solutions. SDG 6 states a universal and equitable access to safe water and sanitation, and SDG 5 states gender equality. Linking these together to create a gendered perspective of resource and sanitation issues has been recognised to be critical for gender equality  (UN Water, 2020) . The relationship between water and gender is one of many complexities. Water related issues such as hygiene, water collection, agriculture, and household food security affect men and women in varying ways. For this reason, this blog aims to unpack water and gender discourses in the context of Africa over the course of the next few months. When writing about Africa, as re
Read more

Bottom-Up vs Top-Down

-
Image
In my last post, I discussed a brief history of development practices, including the emergence of post-colonial development. Today I will talk about different bottom-up and top-down approaches in relation to gender inclusion and equality in water resources in Africa.  Top-Down Approaches Top-down approaches, as seen in my last post, are those where governments, development institutions or NGOs attempt to create policies and programmes that will help provide water resources to communities. However, the main issue here is that they sometimes miss the point. By not talking to the people in the community there is a lack of understanding about who needs the resources what they need them for. Specifically, when it comes to marginalised groups.  Having said this, if governments or development institutions are committed to hel ping those marginalised groups they have the power to do so. For example, governments can change the law in regards to marital property rights, inheritance, land ownersh
Read more