Water, Gender and Development in Africa

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!

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, halve the propo

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 from home, th

WPS, 2012  WHO FETCHES WATER? Gendered norms and roles in the majority of places where water collection is a must, mean that it is the burden of women and girls to collect water as it is part of the daily household chores. Across 24 countries in Sub Saharan Africa, around 13.54 million women and 3.36 million girls were solely responsible for fetching water for their household where collecting water took over 30 minutes ( Graham et, al, 2016 ).  Geere Hunter & Jagal , in their studies of water collection across 6 different communities in rural South Africa, that the structure of water collection was as follows: 56% - Adult women  31% - Girls  10% - Boys  3% - Adult men  WOMEN'S LIVES ARE EXTREMELY INFLUENCED BY WATER COLLECTION This structure is common across the majority of Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) and women's lives are extremely influenced by water collection. Furthermore, the average time spent getting water in SSA is usually much greate