Water, Gender and Development in Africa

Unfortunately, we have come to the end of my blog now! Over the past few weeks, I have looked at a range of different issues which disproportionately affect women including: the unequal access to groundwater, the burden of water collection, gender-based violence, period poverty, inequalities in irrigation, participation in water management and climate change. After exploring these issues in my blog, it has become clear that there is still work to be done to fight gender inequality in relation to water. If gender inequality in relation to water is to be dismantled in Africa, then socio-cultural norms and taboos need to be broken down so that women can have equal opportunities to men. Although improving infrastructures and technologies will help women to an extent, wider societal inequalities between men and women need to be addressed first. In order for this to happen, both men and women should be educated on the issues perpetuated by socio-cultural norms, as well as the benefits that

For my last blog post, I want to look at an issue which we can already see the impacts of across Africa, that is the gendered implications of climate change and its link to water. Africa is now one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change and variability ( Boko et al, 2007 ). The 5th IPCC report estimates that surface temperatures have already increased by 0.5°C in the last century across most parts of Africa and that temperatures are likely to rise by another 2 °C by the end of the century  ( Niang et al, 2014 ). Whilst there are uncertainties in climate change predictions and models, the IPCC has estimated with high confidence that water stress will increase in Africa as a result of climate change and driven by other factors such as land use change and water withdrawals  ( Niang et al, 2014 ). As it has been posed that the impacts of climate change will disproportionately be felt by women, I wanted to explore this in more detail ( UNDP, 2012 ). The Exacerbation of Existin

In today's post, I want to discuss the inequalities faced by women in terms of their agricultural water needs.  Despite the fact that women make up half of Sub-Saharan Africa's agricultural workforce, their agricultural productivity is 20-30% lower than that of men ( FAO, 2018 ); in turn, an agricultural productivity gap has been created between women and men. This post will explore how women across SSA have less access to irrigated agriculture than men due to mismatches in irrigation technologies and land restrictions.  The Mismatch of Irrigation Technologies Many development programmes and people have assumed certain irrigation technologies are most suitable for women across SSA. For example, the suggestion of drip irrigation as an 'appropriate' technology to expand production for women ( Upadhyay, 2003 ;  Upadhyay and Bhamoriya, 2004 ). However, I argue that this approach to finding universal irrigation technologies for women does not work; as women's preferences