The End to This Blog, but Not to Fighting Gender Inequality

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 meaningful participation of women in water management can bring.

Whilst these gender inequality challenges may have brought a negative tone to this blog, I want to end this journey by acknowledging the progress that has already been made in different places across Africa. The relationship that gender has with water and development is certainly being increasingly recognised by people; as our understanding of women's needs in relation to water grows, gender inequality is slowly being dismantled.

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Introduction

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. ...

Gender-Based Violence and WASH

In last week's post, I briefly touched on the topic of gender-based violence (GBV) in relation to water collection. This week, I wanted to do a short post exploring the links between GBV and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), using informal settlements in Kenya as a case study. I will be looking specifically at the infrastructural causes of GBV (e.g. poor WASH facilities) and the social causes (e.g. societal taboos). Figure 1: Toilet in Mathare slum, Nairobi, Kenya The lack in provision of adequate WASH facilities increases women's vulnerability to GBV. Women who lack these basic infrastructures are forced to walk to shared toilet facilities or to even openly defecate. Studies in informal settlements within Nairobi, Kenya found that women who had to walk even 100m to use a public toilet during the night would be at risk of being abused or harassed ( UN Water, 2020 ; Winter and Barchi, 2015 ). Due to poor security and a lack of sufficient lighting, it becomes easier ...

Water Collection: A Woman's Burden

In my previous post, I looked at the inequality in the use and access to groundwater resources between men and women. This week, I will focus on the collection of water and how this affects women in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), physically and mentally. Restricted infrastructures and access to reliable water sources (e.g. piped water systems) results in the burden of extensive travelling to collect water; unfortunately, this responsibility usually falls on women and girls. Indeed, it is estimated that every day women and girls spend around 200 million hours collecting water ( UNICEF, 2016 ). Considering that more than two-thirds of those living in SSA have to leave their houses to collect water, it is integral that we understand how this burden disproportionately affects women ( Graham et al, 2016 ). What are the effects on women? Across SSA, it is primarily women and girls who bear the brunt of water collection. A study carried out across 24 SSA countries by Graham et al (2016) f...

Water, Gender and Development in Africa

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