Introduction: Who has the right to water?
Welcome to my blog on Water and Gender, where I shall use Africa as my case study. The interlinkage of water and gender is multi-faceted, covering a wide span of topics, such as politics, sanitation and, most recently, climate change. It therefore seems appropriate to pay attention to water and gender as a key relationship, particularly where women's voices have not been present enough within the (water) policy arena, and where they face significant disadvantages against the backdrop of increasing water scarcity. There are a few key issues worth discussing, which will come later into play, for my other blog posts. Firstly, women are seen to have primary household responsibility in collection of domestic water , which has become an increasingly concerning issue for two reasons. As time spent on collecting water tends to be quite long, and arduous, this means that particularly girls of school age often must compromise their right to education (Article 26 of the Universal Declara...