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Final thoughts: If development is not engendered, it is endangered

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( UNEP, 2018 ) Hi all, so this will be my last blogpost! Throughout this blog I have focused on a few key areas relating to gender water collection, toilets, menstrual management. I have also tried to show how the water and development paradigm links with broader social issues such as risks or attacks and sexual assaults. I feel it is important to note that while gendered harassment and attack are not explicitly sanitation issues, problems around Water, Sanitation & Hygiene (WaSH) exacerbate existing vulnerably. I began this blog with the intent to focus upon a broad range of gendered topics. As I delved in during the first few weeks of term, I became interested in issues of water and sanitation problems that are generally understudied but that I felt are important to highlight within the development paradigm. Here are a few conclusions from my writings: Although women and men both need adequate access to sanitation , the provision of sustainable water supplies is in ...
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'No more hopscotch': Gender equity, sanitation and girl's education.

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“Periods shouldn't come in the way of us achieving our dreams. I don’t think any girl should miss a school day because she is a girl.”  – Melal, 15, Ethiopia  (Water Aid) In this context menstruation is usually positioned in a water, sanitation and hygiene and highlights the interdependence between sanitation, gender equity and education. As , the la te, UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan said,  "there is no tool for development more effective than the education of girls" ( UN, 2006 )  and without adequate toilet facilities, menstruation creates another gender disparity in education access ( Jewitt and Ryley, 2014 ). 'No more hopscotch' , the title of this blog, is one of the first things a young northern Tanzanian women, in an interview in Sommer's 2012 study, said she missed about girlhood and school. One of the main markers for leaving girlhood and entering adulthood is menstruation. There are many social, cultural and physical implications of be...
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Water and Gendered Vulnerability: Toilets and Risk in Nairobi Part 2- Sanitation Solutions in Nairobi

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WASH campaign, ( WaterAid, 2013 )   I ended my last blog by asking ‘ 'Is the solution then a higher provision of toilets?'  Well, yes and no. This question oversimplifies a complex issue especially regarding gender based violence in Nairobi but I want to understand if sanitation-based development interventions can contribute to the reduction of risk in the lives of women and girls.  One large scale study in India, found that compared to using household toilets, open defecation doubles a woman's odds of non-partner sexual violence ; which does indicate that by improving toilet infrastructure has a direct effect on improving the safety of women ( Jadhav, Weitzman & Smith-Greenaway, 2016 ). While it is somewhat impractical to say the solution to all sanitation problems is having household toilets installed for all,  one recent study in Khayelitsha, South Africa , looked directly at the relationship between the costing involve...
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Water and Gendered Vulnerability: Toilets and Risk in Nairobi Part 1

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“Men face being mugged, women face being raped, when going to the toilet after dark in Kenya’s slums” ( Amnesty International , 2010) According to WHO and UNICEF, 1/3 of women across the world are unable to access safe and adequate toilet amenities ( Gonsalves et. al, 2015 ).  Without planned sewage systems a whole host of issues arise around health and hygiene but recently an increasing number of researchers are pointing to the relationship between sanitation and women's risk of violence.  Walking to distant areas  or using WASH facilities at night puts women and children at risk of sexual harassment  and rape resulting in  sexually transmitted  diseases, pregnancy, "being accused of being unfaithful by husbands, being disowned by families, or mocked by other community members; and mental health challenges such as increased fear and stress " ( WaterAid, 2013 :1). I previously addressed water collection and risk. Water collection c...
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Menstruation matters and the SDGs

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I found this brilliantly detailed and comprehensive info-graphic depicting the link between the Sustainable Development Goals and Menstruation. As this is what I had begun to discuss in my last post ' Water is life.  Sanitation is Dignity ', I thought it would be useful to add this in here:  It is from the Menstrual Hygiene Day project website which can be visited by clicking here .  This week on World  Toilet day after a lecture on sanitation I was  drawn to write my  last post on toilets and menstruation.  After looking at the issues are toilets,  I feel  haven't fully covered  gendered  risk and  vulnerability in ' Water and Gendered Vulnerability: Water Collection and Risk '.  I  had intended to revisit the topic so will do so in my next post . Then the week after I will revisit menstrual management and sanitation. Thanks for reading!
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Water is Life, but Sanitation is Dignity.

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HAPPY WORLD TOILET DAY! On today, 19th November, it is World Toilet Day . It is fitting then that in today’s blog post, I am moving onto sanitation issues and what is at the heart of sanitation? Toilets . World Toilet Day  was designated by the UN in 2010 to promote the issue of sanitation and toilets as a humanitarian device for development. It was to help raise the issue while attempting to remove pre-existing stigmas around going to the toilet.The toilet has since become a major object of development, for example, the  Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's competition  to ' reinvent the toilet '. WaSH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) has been firmly molded into the development agenda over the last decade or more. In the  2000-2015 Millennium Development Goals  did not have a separately specified goal for sanitation; it was included as a subset under  Millennium Development Goal 7, 'Ensure environmental sustainability'  - Target 7C: By 2015, h...
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Water and Gendered Vulnerability: Water Collection and Risk

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Thorpe, 2017 "For us the act of collecting water poses no risk. We go to the tap and fill our glass. But for many in the developing world, particularly women and girls, such a day-to-day chore can be extremely dangerous". -   Jan Eliasson  (former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations).  Water collection is much more than walking to get water and coming back again. In areas with limited water access, issues of privacy and safety are also a major concern. Further to the lost hours and heavy loads discussed in my last blog post, a lack of close and safe water resources, especially in rural Sub-Saraharn Africa, pose a risk to many individuals. In that post I also stated that the average distance traveled for water is  3.7miles/6km and most water collections took over 30 minutes to complete.  Women and children, when fetching water from distant sources, can walk long distances on sometimes dangerous paths, by spending so much time away...
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