Who Wins Water?

Menstruation is a taboo subject for women and girls in East Africa; many women and girls consequently miss out on education, or other productive activity, due to fear of embarrassment from their male peers. W hat's  worse is that the social stigma has  materialised: a  study by Abanyie et al, 2021, showed that, within the municipality of Wa in Ghana,  all the schools lacked menstrual hygiene facilities.   In another Ghanaian municipality: West Gonja,  only 30.8% of the schools had assigned sites for changing of menstrual materials, and no school had menstrual hygiene materials available for emergency use.   Although hygiene and clean water is covered by UN SDG 6, women have  specific  hygiene needs, particularly during menstruation,  and  childbirth.  During childbirth, only a third of women in Uganda, 18% in Kenya, and 7% in Tanzania could access improved water and sanitation in health facilities ( Gon et al., 2016 , Rombo et ...

  “More than 70 per cent of the population in Eastern and Southern Africa (340 million people) have no access to basic sanitation services” .  Despite the presence of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 6: to “ensure availability of clean water and sanitation for all”, practices such as open defecation (OD) pose a severe risk to achieving this goal. It is important to remember the context behind why this practice occurs: O’Keefe, Lüthi and Tobias (2015) remind us that colonial provisioning of sewerage systems is partly to blame for the current poor sanitation conditions, as it only serviced the elites. OD not only serves as a health risk, but as a  privacy one too, particularly to women and girls: many of these women feel their privacy and dignity has been taken away, and the risk of sexual violence lurks too .  To address this, I will explore how the revered solution: Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), gives  women  an integral role to play within thei...

The "victimisation fallacy" (Fröhlich and Gioli, 2015) is common within narratives that surround women and climate change. It presents women as usual victims of environmental change and its consequences, and frames them as helpless, which draws directly upon  Wainaina's satirical conceptualiztion of African women , and reinforces existing gender inequalities.  Indeed, Wainana would agree that "African farmers are  not  helpless in the face of variable and changing climates; they already adapt to climate variability and change in a multiplicity of ways" (Fisher and Carr, 2015) , although some scholars fear "Africans will not be able to keep pace with the scale and speed of current  climate change" ( Kefale and Gebresenbet, 2012 :127), alongside other factors such as poverty and weak marginalisation.  Up until 2016, Uganda was predominantly dependent upon rain-fed agriculture (specifically maize) , until climatic change effectively disturbed rainfall p...

"Although donors and governments often use the term gender when addressing different needs with respect to water resources, they usually mean women". ( Rathgeber, 1996 ) Reading this quote couldn't be truer, and before researching more thoroughly into this topic, I'm guilty of the same charge.   This blog post will explore how women as water collectors in areas of high water scarcity face complex  conflicts at water access points with men, and the solution. Focusing on Marsabit County located in Kenya, here's the hard facts: the county  has not received rain for over three years and over one million livestock have been lost to drought , and  its average amount of annual precipitation is 693mm , and faces extreme dry spells from June to September.  Figure 1: Average monthly precipitation in Marsabit County, Kenya (rain/snow) As a result, conflict often breaks out between different groups over water allocation at water access points. A key example of this is...