Water, Gender and Development in Africa

In today's blog post, I will be looking at the link between groundwater, water scarcity and gender to contextualise the inequalities in the access and use of this water resource. I will be focusing on these inequities in relation to the use of groundwater by using Ethiopia, Ghana and Zambia as case studies. But first, let's have a look at how we define water scarcity... Water Scarcity In the broadest sense, physical water scarcity can be defined as the ‘shortage in the availability of renewable freshwater relative to demand’ ( Damkjaer and Taylor 2017 ). However, it is important to remember that economic water scarcity often plays an integral part in gender disparities too; this refers to the lack of appropriate infrastructure and a limited institutional capacity to ensure a reliable water supply ( Rosa et al, 2020 ). Physically, Africa's arid climate makes its countries particularly vulnerable to significant changes in climate, through effects such as the  El Nino Southern

The Significance of Africa Hello and welcome to my blog! Over the next few weeks, I will be exploring the interconnected relationships between water, development and gender in Africa. This first post of my blog follows shortly after reading Binyavanga Wainaina's satirical essay ' How to Write About Africa '. I thought that this would be a good starting point for my blog as Wainaina (2019) ironically illustrates the common narrative that people tend to use in popular media when writing about Africa, that is one which often generalises and homogenises the diverse physical, social and economic landscapes across Africa. Indeed, these Western narratives often 'treat Africa as if it were one country', stereotyping all citizens as those who must have an 'AK-47' in hand, or those who are 'starving' with 'prominent ribs' ( Wainaina, 2019 ). Therefore, I should be careful in the following weeks to not perpetuate these stereotypes and generalisations.