Women S Issues In Water And Sanitation

Literature survey of the participation of rural women in water supply and sanitation (community development) in developing countries - covers women's traditional involvement in maintenance and management of water supplies, their current role in planning and implementation of development projects for improving water supply and sanitation, socio- economic and health benefits from the projects, etc.; includes an annotated bibliography. Photographs, references, statistical tables.

This book approached water and sanitation as an African gender and human rights issue. Empirical case studies from Kenya, Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe show how coexisting international, national and local regulations of water and sanitation respond to the ways in which different groups of rural and urban women gain access to water for personal, domestic and livelihood purposes. The authors, who are lawyers, sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists, explore how women cope in contexts where they lack secure rights, and participation in water governance institutions, formal and informal. The research shows how women - as producers of family food - rely on water from multiple sources that are governed by community based norms and institutions which recognise the right to water for livelihood. How these ‘common pool water resources’ - due to protection gaps in both international and national law - are threatened by large-scale development and commercialisation initiatives, facilitated through national permit systems, is a key concern. The studies demonstrate that existing water governance structures lack mechanisms which make them accountable to poor and vulnerable water users on the ground, most importantly women. The findings thus underscore the need to intensify measures to hold states accountable, not just in water services provision, but in assuring the basic human right to clean drinking water and sanitation; and also to protect water for livelihoods.

The United Nations has proclaimed the 21st century to be the century of water. In this volume, Water and Women in Past, Present and Future, scholars analyze the gendered political economy of water resource allocations and importantly, offer recommendations for viable, women-friendly solutions to address scarcity and distribution, among other issues. Contributors also explore feminist analyses of the aesthetic dimension of water and the feminine, since water is often associated with women, shown in cross-cultural examples of mythology, symbols and legends. Intersecting the fields of hydro-politics and aesthetics, this book should be of interest to policy analysts, activists, and academics.

Given the lack of consensus around how to measure empowerment in WASH, mapping existing indicators to two frameworks frequently used in the empowerment literature illustrates knowledge gaps. We identified 290 gender-sensitive indicators across nine WASH themes that were mapped to the Reach-Benefit-Empower and Resources-Agency-Achievements frameworks. Most indicators measure “Benefit” and/or “Resources.” Existing gender-sensitive indicators capturing empowerment and agency in WASH are lacking; only 10.3% of indicators capture “Empower” and 24.8% of indicators capture “Agency.”