Water, Gender and Development in Africa

The Issue Period poverty is described as a lack of knowledge about menstruation, and the inability to access menstrual hygiene products (MHPs) or WASH facilities. It’s greatly detrimental to people who menstruate as menstrual taboos are firmly rooted within society, like the perception that menstrual blood is both polluted and polluting.  Evidence of using menstrual products is hidden in fear and shame , by drying reusable cloths in dark, damp and unhygienic places, and staying up late or waking up early to clean them. Used sanitary products that are not properly buried, can curse  people with infertility. Described by Houppert (1999) as a ‘culture of concealment’, those who are menstruating are expected to maintain their menstrual practices as invisible and silent.  Because of this, one in ten students in sub-Saharan Africa repeatedly miss school during their period. The shame and fear of leaking blood whilst using alternative, and often unhygienic sanitary items, s...

In light of the challenges women face raised by inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) facilities in my last blog post, I have dedicated this blog post to the Mathare 10 project: a Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) initiative in Kenya, aimed at eliminating open defecation.  The City Council of Nairobi enforced the Environmental Sanitation and Hygiene Policy in 2007 to improve universal access to sanitation via a participatory, people-centred approach. As part of this law, Plan Kenya, an international, humanitarian development organisation introduced CLTS to ten villages in Mathare, Kenya, in June 2010. The Mathare 10 project is a participatory approach that aims to achieve open defecation communities, replace ‘flying toilet’ practices through the use of a night bucket system, and encourage landlords to agree to construct latrines for their tenants. Non-government organisations (NGOs) and community-based organisations (CBOs) are the primary sanitation and solid was...

Last week was World Toilet Day, which aims to draw attention to the 2 billion people who still lack access to basic sanitation . The purpose of this post is to explore how the persistent lack of adequate sanitation disproportionately affects the health and productivity of women and girls. Toilets are a basic human right, as outlined by SDG Goal 6: ‘water and sanitation for all’, yet the lack of access to toilets has direct consequences on health, drinking-water sources, and the spread of water-borne diseases.  World Toilet Day is an effort to address the sanitation crisis.    I am focusing on Mathare, a rapidly growing urban settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. The situation is most acute in Mathare, where 300,000 residents only have access to 144 shared and publicly available toilets (Figure 1). That is one toilet shared between approximately 2000 people.       Figure 1: Map of toilets in Mathare, Nairobi.   Why do so many people lack access to adequate ...

Today, I will highlight the unjust role of women as primary water collectors and how this accentuates gender inequality. I am using multiple case studies across Zimbabwe, including Manyanhaire et al. (2009) case study of Mundenda village, to analyse the discriminatory nature of water collection, which disproportionately falls on the shoulders of women; a staggering 83% of women are primary water collectors in rural Zimbabwe . Time Poverty   In Mundenda, distances to collect water range from 500 metres to 5 kilometres, with two or three trips taken daily , each trip lasting 30 minutes on average. This situation is not improved in urban areas either, since Remigios (2011) investigated water collection in Kadoma's high-density suburbs and found that women would have to wake up as early as 3 a.m. to join queues at boreholes, as water is vital for cooking, cleaning, bathing, and drinking. Women are essentially obligated to undertake this responsibility. Water is a crucial resource for...

COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, is now underway. This provides a perfect opportunity to explore the fundamental concerns surrounding gender and climate change.  According to the IPCC , "Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change and climate variability". For example, alpine glaciers in the Rwenzori mountains of East Africa are highly sensitive to changes in temperature. A study by Taylor et al. (2006) found that rising air temperatures of ~0.5 degrees Celsius over the last four decades contributed to a rapid glacier recession rate of ~0.7km2 per decade. As this warming continues, a shift towards fewer but heavier precipitation events is expected , leading to more frequent and intense floods and prolonged droughts, thus contributing to water and food insecurity.  Why does gender matter in this discourse?    Women "in the global South are particularly vulnerable to climate-related hazards, and resource scarcity" , as a re...

  1 – Introduction  Welcome to my blog on 'Gender, Water and Development in Africa'. I intend to outline my motivations to explore this topic and briefly contextualise the role of gender within water and development discourse. This is a crucial issue as water scarcity disproportionately affects women since they are overly impacted by the lack of access to safe and clean water and hygiene infrastructures.    Binyavanga Wainaina's (2005) essay  How to Write About Africa   uses brutal satire to illustrate how Africa is frequently misinterpreted and portrayed in Western media and literature. Wainaina employs a sarcastic voice to reinforce existing preconceptions of Africa as a homogenous nation with a 'primitive' character. The author romanticises its hardship and poverty while purposely ignoring the joy in the lived experiences of everyday encounters, and mocks an entire continent of ethnically diverse people by portraying them as mostly destitute, helpless, i...