A WOW! e-Brief

Work of Women program @ World Neighbors

January 2007

Introduction

Overview on Women and Water

Water is essential for human survival, indeed the survival of all life. Yet throughout the world, over a billion people go without sufficient water. Eighty-four percent of the people struggling without enough potable water live in rural areas. These facts alone make water a women’s issue. However, women also have special needs and concerns related to water. Though there are many ways to look at water, including the tragedies that occur when hurricanes, tsunamis and flooding affect people’s lives, this overview will focus on the critical issue of access to sufficient potable, or drinking, water.

Throughout the world, the collection, transportation and management of household water is overwhelmingly a job for women and girls. In some areas of Africa, women spend up to six or seven hours a day collecting and transporting water for household use. This role is theirs even when they are tired, sick or burdened with many other responsibilities. Devoting this amount of time to water collection—what is almost a normal work day for many women in the developed world—means they are taking this time away from tasks that could contribute to income generation, food production and self- and community improvement. They must also use up energy and calories on this labor, often when they are under-nourished or in poor health. Finally, the daily toil of traveling long distances for water, often at dawn and dusk, make them vulnerable to violence or injury at many points along their travel route and to exploitation at collection points.

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Once the long journey to water collection points is made, all too often the water found is scarce and dirty. As a Haitian woman in one of the communities World Neighbors partners with remembers, “You wouldn’t want to wash your feet in it.” Yet when dirty water is all there is, that is what a family must use. Home usage of dirty or substandard water brings a host of problems, including water born diseases. Ninety percent of the 1.8 million people who die from diarrheal diseases each year are children under the age of five. Diseases spread via contaminated water include diarrhea, cholera, typhoid and amoebiasis. Lack of potable water also contributes directly to poor hygiene, which in turn increases susceptibility to illnesses and worsens many others, including HIV/AIDS. Nutrition is also affected, since In many areas women need extra water to use in caring for kitchen gardens that can supplement otherwise poor diets.

Maintaining good personal hygiene is virtually impossible when clean water is unavailable. Women cannot wash themselves, nor can they keep babies and children clean. Lack of clean water is also a great risk for pregnant women, since good quality water is important in disease prevention and to babies’ overall health. Because women are the primary care givers in most families, they are also directly impacted by poor family health. The absence of household toilets or community latrines means that this human necessity is accomplished in fields, behind trees or otherwise in the open. This is especially difficult for women when cultural or social hindrances require that they wait until dark or arise before dawn to do so.

Lack of clean water and adequate sanitation also affects educational opportunities. In many developing countries, girls are less likely than boys to enroll and attend schools for a variety of reasons related to cultural biases, family demands and work loads. However, high among the reasons is a lack of latrines or bathrooms. Girls often cannot attend full-day when they are unable to relieve themselves during the day. When they are menstruating, many are forced to simply stay home and miss school. This creates an extra burden, which over time can discourage the young women from making the sacrifices necessary to attend school.

Family income is also negatively affected by lack of, or difficult, access to clean water. For example, the time investment women must make to collect water means that they are taken away from income generating activities. Some options for earning money are out of reach when water is unavailable to process food, provide irrigation for vegetables or give to small livestock raised for eventual sale.

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Many of these challenges not only impact physical health but directly affect women and girls’ dignity and confidence. Being able to address bodily needs and maintain basic hygiene with some degree of privacy has been shown to raise confidence, increase school attendance and promote community involvement and leadership. Indeed, women’s empowerment is inextricably linked to improving the water supply, sanitation and hygiene practices.

As more attention is paid to access to potable water, most agree that water is a basic human necessity, and access to sufficient, clean water is a basic human right. However, there is growing debate about whether water is a common good or a private commodity. Most countries have chosen to treat water as a public utility since access to potable water is such a basic requirement for health and life. However, countries that are cash-poor have been pressured by international institutions such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank to privatize their water systems, or enact public-private partnerships. In practice, while privatization has been promoted as an answer to governments’ inability to provide basic services, it has brought with it a host of problems, including price increases, drops in water quality, exclusion of poor neighborhoods from service and overall reduced accountability to citizens. There is growing organization against privatization efforts in the U.S. and abroad, including the January 24 launch of the African Water Network at the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya.

The availability of sufficient, good quality water is an essential ingredient to health and a better life for hundreds of thousands of women in poor, rural communities around the world. Without this, human development is impossible.

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