Women and water in the developing world

Published: March 24, 2008, 1:39 pm

Updated: February 18, 2011, 6:47 am

Topics:

Environmental Ethics (main) Environmental & Resource Management (main) Water (main) Natural Resource Management & Policy (main) Sustainable Development (main) International Environmental Issues (main)

Young girl at a water pump in Mali, West Africa. Credit: Ferdinand Reus

Introduction In 1992 the International Conference on Water and the Environment held in Dublin, Ireland, produced four key principles to guide policies for water (Water resources) (Women and water in the developing world) and sustainable development. Known as the Dublin Principles, they represent the current international consensus on ‘best practices’ in the water sector: # Fresh water (Freshwater biomes) is a finite and vulnerable resource, essential to sustain life, development and the environment. # Water development and management should be based on a participatory approach, involving users, planners and policy-makers at all levels. # Women play a central part in the provision, management and safeguarding of water. # Water has an economic value in all its competing uses and should be recognized as an economic good.

In 2000, at the United Nations Millennium Summit, world leaders committed to a collaborative program of sustainable development, greater gender equality and increased access to health and education through the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Greater access for people to water and sanitation is key to achieving each of the eight goals, but of especial interest to this essay are:

• Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women; and

• Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability, with a specific target to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to water and sanitation.

International agencies have made water (Water resources) for women a cornerstone of their development and humanitarian efforts, but much debate surrounds the nature and consequences of their policies. Dublin Principle III simply states the centrality of women to water and of water to women; no specific actions or recommendations are embedded in its language. The Principle has overwhelmingly been interpreted as calling for the increased participation of women in the planning and implementation of water projects. Influential gender-equity advocates even argue that there is a positive synergy between women’s interests and the management and conservation of natural resources. However, critics counter that naïvely designed ‘women-centered’ projects can merely add to the responsibilities of already over-burdened women, without transforming the power imbalances that constrain their lives at home or in society. So are water projects in which women play a central part likely to increase their workloads rather than their well being? Is the participation of women in these projects either necessary or sufficient for project success? The evidence allows us to answer these questions in a tentative manner at best. This is so in part because of the general disconnect between scholarship on water policy and scholarship on gender, and in part because the water sector is weak on the kinds of data we need to get more definite answers.

Women and water for domestic use

Access

‘Access’ to the minimum quantity of water necessary for domestic use, usually meaning drinking, cooking, washing utensils and basic hygiene, can be defined in many ways. The UNICEF/WHO Joint Monitoring Program (JMP), the main source of national level data on access, defines ‘reasonable access’ as 20 liters per person per day from an improved source, no more than 1 km distant from the dwelling. ‘Improved’ sources are household taps, public standpipes, boreholes, protected dug wells, protected springs and collected rainwater. ‘Unimproved’ sources according to the JMP are unprotected wells, unprotected springs, rivers or ponds, vendor-provided water and bottled water. These data should be used with caution, because there are major disparities in data collection accuracy across regions.

Current JMP estimates are that 85% of the population has access in Latin America and the Caribbean, 81% in Asia and 62% in Africa (Table 1). Globally, approximately 65% of the population without access to safe water lives in Asia and 28% in Africa. Though these access numbers do not directly translate to those of access for women, they are reasonable proxies because it is almost always women and children who are responsible for the daily provision of domestic water.

TABLE 1: Access to drinking water by region
Region	Area within region	% of population with access
Latin America & Caribbean	Overall	85
	Urban	93
	Rural	62
Asia	Overall	81
	Urban	93
	Rural	75
Africa	Overall	62
	Urban	85
	Rural	47

Source: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation. 2000. Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report.

Lack of access to an improved [[water (Water resources)] source], or even difficult or unreliable conditions of access, translates to what the 2006 UN Human Development Report has called “time poverty” for women and children. Overall, the report estimates that some 40 billion mostly woman-hours per year are being spent fetching water in sub-Saharan Africa alone. Estimates from South Asia are quite similar. NGOs working in rural India (Water profile of India) report that women in many villages find themselves walking 2 km or more to their daily drinking water source. Case studies from South Asia as well as Africa suggest that women place high values on the opportunity cost of the time spent in collecting water; and when access to water improves, more time can be devoted to income-generating activities such as agriculture and micro-enterprises. Other researchers point out, however, that freed up time is used for income generation if such opportunities exist and if women are able and willing to use them. They argue that easier access to water is desirable not just for economic reasons but for overall quality of life, regardless of how the extra time is spent.

Urban and peri-urban areas in the developing world may have household connections, or standpipe water within a short distance of the home. In such cases women and children would not have to walk long distances, but waiting in line takes time. In densely populated slums such as Kibera, Kenya (Water profile of Kenya), waiting times at water kiosks of 1-2 hours have been reported, while slums in Dhaka, Bangladesh (Water profile of Bangladesh), could have a standpipe to person ratio of 1:500. As in rural areas, most of the fetching and waiting in urban areas falls upon women and girl children. The 2006 Human Development Report concludes that there is a “straight trade-off between time spent in school and time spent collecting water”, and that this is much less true for boys than it is for girls (HDR 2006 p47). The lack of reliable access to water and sanitation could therefore be a major contributor to continuing gender inequality in education and the opportunities that education can provide.

Health

Even households with access to what the JMP calls an ‘improved’ source might not actually be getting water that is safe to drink. Sources of surface as well as ground water are increasingly contaminated from human and animal waste, agricultural runoff, chemicals such as fluorine or arsenic, and industrial effluents. Few municipalities in the developing world provide potable quality water in their pipelines, and few rural water supply agencies systematically test wells for water quality or treat poor-quality water even to a secondary level. The most deadly health cost of waterborne diseases is the 1.8 million lives of children under five that diarrhea claims every year. In addition, the suffering caused by sickness and disability from waterborne, water-washed and water-related diseases, such as intestinal helminths, periodic episodes of cholera, blinding trachoma and schistosomiasis is amply documented in the public health and epidemiological literatures. But much less attention has been paid to the health risks that women face as water carriers.

Women and (usually) girl children fetch water in pots, buckets or ideally more modern narrow-necked containers, which are carried on the head or on the hips. A family of five would need 100 liters of water a day to meet its minimum needs; the weight of that water is 100 kg (220 pounds). In these circumstances, women and children may need to walk to the water source two or three times daily, with the first of these trips taking place before dawn. Globally, more than 50% of poor women suffer malnutrition and iron deficiency and thus it should not be surprising that, especially during the dry season in rural India and Africa, 30% or more of a woman’s daily energy intake is spent just in fetching water. Carrying heavy loads over long periods of time causes cumulative damage to the spine, the neck muscles and the lower back, thus leading to the early ageing of the vertebral column. The burden of daily carrying is rarely covered in leading public health and epidemiological journals, as it falls outside of the conventional categories of “water-borne, water-washed and water-related”.

Gender, water and participation

Water researchers as well as practitioners at the community, national and international levels have become much more gender-sensitive than was previously the case. In particular, many researchers and practitioners have converged on the desirability of local-level or community participation in water management, especially women participation.

The arguments in favor of women’s participation in decision-making over the use and management of local [[water (Water resources)] resources] range from sustainable development to women’s empowerment and higher status. The failure of many community-based water resource management projects has been attributed to the exclusion of women at all levels of the project, and to the inability of project planners to take their (often hidden) knowledge and priorities into account. Numerous reports from Asia and Africa suggest that the inclusion of women as participants and decision-makers increased their access to, and control over, local water resources. For instance, an ambitious report from UNICEF and the Water and Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council provides case-based evidence on women-centered participation in water and sanitation efforts from around the world. Citing cases from Pakistan (Water profile of Pakistan), Nepal (Water profile of Nepal), India (Water profile of India), South Africa (Water profile of South Africa), Kenya (Water profile of Kenya), Tanzania (Water profile of Tanzania) and several other nations, the report finds that “placing women at the center” of water and sanitation decisions can lead to more households with access to water, more cost effective service delivery, better placement and maintenance of water infrastructure, better community health and hygiene and less corruption in financial matters. On the other hand, statistical studies of rural water projects have been more circumspect about the consequences of women’s participation. These caution that women’s involvement in participatory water projects is often of a token kind, and that it is still unclear on when participation in community projects improves their access to water, or their empowerment overall.

Three broad points emerge from a review of gender and participation in drinking water projects. First, while the roles that women play in planning and management can be very important to the success of water projects, effective community participation does not always require women to play a central part. Firmer conclusions from the empirical evidence cannot be reached, because there are few projects for which comprehensive gender-disaggregated data are collected. Second, participation takes many forms. At low levels (of power, not necessarily of time) it can mean donating labor or perhaps attending meetings without speaking up. At higher levels of power it can mean active involvement in decisions about water-related technologies and priorities. It seems plausible that the level and nature of participation could make a difference both to the success of the water project, and to any spillover effects on women’s lives.

Third, the literature is sometimes unclear on the goal of a participatory project – is it women’s empowerment, sustainable development, simply easier access to a [[water (Water resources)] source], or some combination of these? Projects that enable women to supplement their agricultural incomes on account of access to water may well increase household incomes, but may contribute less directly to women’s empowerment. ‘Participatory’ projects in which women take on water-related responsibilities for which they are not paid have also been critiqued for implicitly assuming that women are ‘natural’ protectors of environmental resources. What Amartya Sen has called the well-being aspect and the agency aspect (138 p190, emphasis in original) of gender analysis inevitably intersect and yet, they are conceptually quite different. At present, women-and-water discussions are sometimes caught between the goals of well-being and agency, and at other times appear to conflate the two.

Women and water for irrigation

Access

About 800 million people are estimated to suffer from chronic hunger, and the majority of these live on un-irrigated small farms, of less than 2 hectares, in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The default image of ‘the small farmer’ and of the ‘farm head of household’ in the research and policy documents is a male image. Yet almost 10 years ago, an FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)) bulletin reported that in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean 80% of staple foods were grown by women, and that almost 90% of the labor in Asian rice fields was female labor. Field surveys from India (Water profile of India), Nepal (Water profile of Nepal) and South Africa (Water profile of South Africa) confirm both men and women, especially in female-headed households, participate in irrigation. Yet, women’s priorities have proven easier to integrate into the domestic water sector than in the irrigation sector because domestic water has always been considered ‘the women’s domain’. Researchers such as Zwarteveen have argued that a near-exclusive focus on gender in the domestic water sector overlooks the gendered impacts of irrigation technologies and institutions. It also risks cementing gender inequalities by emphasizing the role of women as home-makers and mothers, rather than as producers as well.

The literature on small-farm irrigation brings up three gender-specific concerns. First, it suggests that women are often denied direct (that is, not mediated by male relatives) access to irrigation water. From the productivity as well as equity perspectives, there is considerable evidence to suggest that allocating water to men and to women would increase household incomes. Second, new participatory irrigation management policies may not improve women’s access to water unless the policies take account of gender-specific roles in agriculture. Unlike drinking water, which is accepted as being in the women’s domain, women and men in a community or even household may need and use irrigation water in different ways. Third, the transformation in agriculture that irrigation brings about increases women’s well-being through increases in household income, but could also increase women’s workloads without control over the additional income.

The primary sources of information on women and irrigation are case studies from agricultural communities around the world. These illustrate the structural and household-level constraints to women’s access to irrigation, as well as the multiple ways in which access can be mediated. The most common constraint identified by a number of studies from around the world is that women typically lack formal or enforceable rights to irrigation water. In a pioneering earlier study of land rights in India, Agarwal showed that women were denied access to a range of social and economic opportunities because these were available primarily to formal (mostly male) holders of land. Zwarteveen suggests that direct access to water is similarly important for women’s well-being and for greater productivity in agriculture. Several field-based studies in anthropology as well as economics have confirmed that women are efficient irrigators as well and productive farmers. However in most canal irrigation systems water is allocated to the official landowner, usually male. Women who have become de facto heads of households are not necessarily entitled to reliable water rights. Well ownership is also often a function of land ownership; thus, land ownership patterns directly preclude many women from water rights.

It would be naïve to assume, of course, that a changed property rights regime will automatically ensure access and opportunity for hitherto deprived women. Nor can it be assumed that exclusion from the formal rights regime always leads to deprivation. Field studies confirm that women without formal rights attempt to get water through social networks or through access to paid labor, or through helpful or influential men. One such way is to send their sons or sons-in-law to the formal water users’ association meetings, so they can get their needs and complaints expressed without participating themselves. Another way might be to use their status as ‘vulnerable’ women to secure informal user rights to the village water source. However, these studies generally conclude that such informal channels are generally not reliable, and that such channels of access need continual maintenance with social visits and small gifts. Thus, they are likely to be less conducive to women’s access than more formal or even customary rights.

Several studies show that gender-specific roles are the norm in agriculture, which creates opportunities for both conflict and cooperation when it comes to water use. These separate responsibilities may call for trade-offs in irrigation delivery and its timing. In Sri Lanka (Water profile of Sri Lanka), for example, rice is largely a male responsibility and millet largely a female one, but the delivery schedule for canal water usually favors rice as it is the ‘main’ crop. Irrigating homestead crops – which contribute to family health and nutrition but not to cash revenues – may be discounted when making up the seasonal canal water delivery schedule. The within-household allocation of irrigation water calls for hard choices when there are many uses of a limited resource and many desirable policy goals.

Gender, irrigation and participation

Even more than for the drinking water sector, decentralized management, devolution of rights and responsibilities to water users’ associations (WUAs) and financial accountability in the public irrigation sector has taken hold throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. This devolution is known as participatory irrigation management (PIM) or irrigation management transfer (IMT). The primary reasons for the rapid acceptance of PIM were the heavy financial burden of major canal systems on governments, and the growing belief that if water systems are ‘owned’ by their users, they will be better able to use, allocate and manage them. As such, the spirit of PIM seemed to reflect both the second and the fourth Dublin Principles – that water management decisions should be made in a participatory manner by farmers and users, and that water is an economic good and thus should be used efficiently. The evidence on the irrigation and economic performance of PIM has been both positive and negative, and the introduction of PIM has certainly impacted both women and men farmers. However, the treatment of gender issues in the PIM literature is quite different from that in the domestic water literature.

As discussed earlier, despite theoretical and policy differences in the domestic water sector, there has been an explicit consensus that the inclusion of women is necessary, and preferably at all levels. Because irrigation bureaucracies rarely consider women as farmers in their own right, and because the usual assumption is that women will automatically benefit from water allocated to their households, PIM policies were not formulated or implemented with gender equity in mind. Based on several case studies in South Asia, researchers have found that irrigation agencies have considerable influence in organizing WUAs, but that women are rarely recognized as irrigators and therefore as potential members with formal rights. They note that women participate informally by, for example, assisting their husbands, but argue that access to formal participation in WUAs would increase women’s bargaining power in the home as well as better secure their access to water. Finally, Zwarteveen points out that as long as PIM studies are conducted at the aggregate scheme level, and neglect to collect and analyze data on gender and women, we cannot know the gender impacts of PIM. This neglect, she avers, not only leaves the irrigation community uninformed about gender, it also reinforces the view that gender is not an important aspect of PIM.

Several technologies have been discussed in the literature on irrigation development as affordable, sustainable and gender-equity friendly. Rainwater harvesting, for example, is enjoying a revival in many arid parts of Asia and Africa, with widespread international support. Its proponents emphasize its ability to recharge groundwater and its potential for gender equality through access to water, women’s participation in community decisions and increased employment for women in construction and maintenance activities. But while several studies confirm that rainwater harvesting increases community (and thus women’s) well-being through the availability of year round water for drinking and irrigation, there is hardly any research on the hoped-for gender equality effects. Another promising candidate for poverty alleviation with women’s participation is the human powered treadle pump, which has gained popularity in the shallow aquifer zones of India (Water profile of India), Bangladesh (Water profile of Bangladesh) and Nepal (Water profile of Nepal). Actively promoted as a sustainable development and business model by NGOs such as International Development Enterprises, research has shown that the treadle pump can increase the incomes of extremely small farms by up to $100 a year. At the same time, a market for treadling has emerged in which many very poor women suffer pain and fatigue when they treadle for wages for long hours. The role of low-cost irrigation technologies for poverty alleviation for men as well as women, and for greater gender (and class) equity, is seriously in need of more empirical research.

This essay so far has suggested that women’s participation at all levels is widely considered necessary for productivity, equity and sustainability, and is central to donor policies in the rural water sector. However, that women should play prominent (if not equal) roles with men in irrigation management, or even that efficient irrigation is unambiguously good for women, has been questioned on several counts. The productivity of irrigated agriculture, or the substitution of labor for water in order to use water efficiently, could lead to higher levels of women’s labor. This is particularly possible if the terms of trade within households are biased against women. Participatory institutions may be based on pooling time and cash resources, thus tending to exclude the poorest women and women with young children who are typically pressed for both.

On the other hand, the Gender and Water Alliance calls for more women’s participation in irrigation precisely on the grounds of higher productivity in women’s hands, because of “their more conscientious labor inputs and attention to detailed management” (40 p39). They argue that drinking water interventions that do not have agricultural potential may not be considered a priority by women in rural communities. In fact, several researchers have commented on the unrealistic assumptions of the traditional sectoral approach to [[water (Water resources)] resources] planning and development. In rural areas, they argue, multiple uses and users of water are the norm. Women use drinking water for irrigating tomatoes; they use irrigation water for laundry and livestock care; and men use ‘women’s’ handpumps to wash and bathe. It is often the poor who use water designated for irrigation for non-irrigation purposes, and women who find irrigation canals a handy source of water for a range of productive and domestic needs. Thus, it is being argued, especially by researchers in the irrigation management sector, that designing ‘irrigation’ systems for multiple uses from the start will more optimally allocate the water among all the stakeholders.

Concluding thoughts

The published literature on women and water, while acknowledging the gravity of millions of women’s highly circumscribed access to basic water supplies, is nevertheless a contentious literature. There are debates over whether access for water should be sought primarily for its value to development, or for its intrinsic value for quality of life; and over whether participation is necessary, or even desirable, to ensure action on women’s priorities for water. Some of the debates in the literature reflect the paucity of information on the effectiveness of women’s participation in the water sector. Given that women’s inclusion and active participation are goals of water sector policy and funding almost everywhere, credible impact studies are critical to understand in what circumstances participation in water and irrigation can benefit women, in which ways, and – because women are not a homogeneous category – which women. Some of the debates reflect the gaps between policy and practice: though gender has been mainstreamed into the policy frameworks of many international agencies, there is hardly any evidence of donor agencies refusing to fund a project on the grounds that their gender policies were not being followed. A first step towards resolving some of the debates could be a concerted effort by researchers, agencies and NGOs in the water sector to collect gender-disaggregated data as their default practice. A related second step would be more collaborative work between the water sector and the broader community of gender and development researchers.

Overall, few comprehensive assessments of the international water situation emphasize the third Dublin Principle. Few water-related indicators have anything to say on the role of women in fetching, purifying or irrigating. Leading indicators of women’s status, such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), do not include measures specific to water access such as “average walking distance to improved water source”. Similarly, contentious policy debates often gloss over the differential impacts of water policies on men and women. For example, paying for water is seen by many as efficient for the user as well as for the state, especially since the fourth Dublin Principle became internationally accepted. The literature on cost recovery in developing countries is voluminous, but rarely addresses the impacts of cost recovery on women. It has been argued that women pay the coping costs of distant and unreliable water supplies and so would benefit from more expensive but better access, and it has been argued that if women do not control the household cash income they may not be willing or able to pay more for water. Gender-disaggregated data on willingness or ability to pay are scarce. Yet gender-specific impact evaluation, and success or failure analysis, are all ultimately dependent on gender-disaggregated data.

There is also an urgent need for more collaborative research between gender scholars and water policy analysts, a collaboration that may have to overcome field-specific theoretical, philosophical and practical differences. Almost all the examples of women’s participation in water projects for drinking or for irrigation focus on increasing women’s involvement and/or agency at the local and community levels. These same studies are clearly aware of the structural constraints to greater agency, such as long-standing asymmetries in the expectations of men and women; unequal property rights in land and water; and the larger ecological-environmental changes within which women’s local participation must take place. Social structures also divide women by class, community identity, age and marital status. Yet,structures do change in response to changes in the broader economy and also to bottom:up pressures. Gender and development analysis in academia has struggled for some time to understand what shapes the conditions of and opportunities for choice for women and men within specific structures. The policy-oriented literature on women and water has a long way to go in this regard. Yet, much more than traditional scholarship on gender and development, the mainstream water management literature understands the ground realities of implementing women-centered policies under remarkably diverse conditions. The promise of collaboration is that it can address the general lack of a gendered analysis in large parts of the water management literature, and the general lack of a water focus in large parts of the gender and development literature.

Notes (Women and water in the developing world)

Further Reading

• International Conference on Water and the Environment
• Ray, Isha. 2007. Women, Water and Development. Annual Review of Environment and Resources.
• Tinker, Irene. (ed) Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development. New York / Oxford: Oxford Univ Press, 1990. ISBN: 0195061586
• Zwarteveen, Margreet, 1997. Water: from basic need to commodity. World Development 25: 1335 - 49.

Citation

Ray, I. (2011). Women and water in the developing world. Retrieved from http://editors.eol.org/eoearth/wiki/Women_and_water_in_the_developing_world

1 Comment

Anumakonda Jagadeesh wrote: 02-26-2011 05:17:30

Excellent information on Water and women in developing countries.Very useful. Dr.a.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India