Water, Gender and Power

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 ).  Source  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 childr