Archive for October 2019

It is tempting to discount the role of gender in private sector water provision. Whereas in community-managed water provision we saw how deeply mere matters of scale (shifting agency from the large-scale public to the small-scale home) could implicate female participation in water-related decisions, in private sector water provision it is difficult to locate the role of gender in the equation.

However, it is crucial to ask if concerns of efficiency in neoliberal models of water provision are biased against women.

Parties who advocate for the involvement of the private sector in water provision highlight the potential of water prices to improve water allocation, efficiency, and resource conservation. Water tariffs incentivise Africans to use water more efficiently. However, could this concept of efficiency be a Eurocentric one? What we consider essential uses of water may as well be extravagant for African communities.

For instance, research has shown that women especially forgo uses of water to do with sanitation, for instance hand washing, in favour of saving the water for other uses such as water, given the sheer labour involved with collecting water. In this sense, it is likely that women disproportionately take on the burden of "saving" water to save on water costs, precisely because it is women who bear the consequences of these costs.

Where women and children spend hours of walking with heavy jerrycans of water, it seems almost foolish to use them where the benefits seem trivial or not immediate. There are so many other health risks - open defecation, inadequate waste disposal, poor healthcare - so much so that to spend precious water on what may seem more urgent and in control seems far more wise.

Furthermore, the free market is inherently inequitable, for the ability to vote with one's dollar is deeply contingent on a host of factors controlled by a host of agents. Even where property and capital is accounted for in wealth, there are so many structural barriers inhibiting women and the poor from accessing this capital, for instance the exclusion of women from owning land tenures even where they might be recognised as the main carers for the land.

This week, we discussed the subtopic of community-based water systems in Africa. Water systems, when developed and maintained by communities, are significantly different from the more top-down approaches to water provision that may be the norm in the Anglo world, such as the provision by the government or private sector.

However, we know that these numerous and complicated interactions between the hydrological and social worlds (if at all they are distinct) are deeply constitutive of, also indicative of, gender roles and dynamics. What then might community-based water supply imply for gender in Africa?
Previously, I highlighted the normative ideologies which governed via social pressure what types of work African women could partake in, and conversely, should refrain from. The range of work that is considered that "of women" – preparing food, managing domestic utilities, emotional labour – make clear the hegemonic view that a woman's place is in the domestic, the private, and the home. On the other hand, male work is always public. It is, most importantly, paid; it is recognised in the formal economy; it is always visible, and everyday life is structured around this form of work. This is what is referred to as a separate spheres ideology, and highlights how and why supposedly 50-50 divisions in labour may be far from an equal binary.

The public sphere is placed on a pedestal. It is after all the domain of paid work and public recognition, and is viewed to be the building block of trade and society. The private sphere is in perpetual under-recognition. That everyday life would not be possible without the workings of women in the domestic sphere is not in the slightest a common revelation, and as such the work of women is hardly considered work at all.
As a result, as pointed out by Crow et al. (2011), African women experience time poverty, because the lines between "work" and "home" for them are, after all, absent. Home is for rest, yet for women, home is precisely where they cannot rest. Albeit spending more time at work, household work and emotional labour is hardly viewed as "work", but more often than not a mere biological or natural duty for women. Hence, women spend more time at work, but they never rest – they are time-poor.

Crow et al. point out that action can be taken to decrease the workload for women, particularly in the domain of water supply. For instance, by developing piped water systems, households can receive water directly, instead of requiring that (likely) women travel on foot for hours to collect it. However, it requires a great deal of collective action successfully call for the implementation of pipes. Though women bear most, if not all responsibility for household water supply, it is precisely women who also have the least (if any) ability to mobilise this collective action, for even the simple technology of spring protection requires significant labour, capital and collective decision-making, of which African women are often institutionally and structurally excluded from. Furthermore, such barriers tend to be embedded in wider exclusionary traditions and policies; for instance, the exclusion of women in irrigation decisions may not be entirely independent, but grounded in wider exclusionary traditions which hindered women from receiving land tenures, though they may be well-accepted as the keepers of the land otherwise.

Albeit these difficulties, should the management of water supply be somehow nevertheless transferred successfully to the community, we will witness a shift away from water provision at the public scale. A move closer towards the scale of the domestic, then, implies a great deal for African women. Where the separate spheres ideology has been deeply entrenched, shifting the decision-making and authority downscale and closer towards the domestic sphere, may be the first step in increasing female participation and autonomy in hydrological decisions (in which they were always deeply implicated).
However, we need to be cautious. The merits of somewhat easily increasing female participation without being contingent on monumental shifts in long-entrenched gender norms are valid; yet, they might obscure the restrictive structures which trap women within the subservient domestic sphere, and hinder women from accessing the dominant public sphere and its benefits. Community water management increases the participation of women in a system in which they are thoroughly invested, but we must move beyond to attack the very structures which perpetuate gendered public-private dichotomies to begin with.

Mwanawaki ni maji, they say in Swahili; women are water.

In discussing the interactions between people and their environment in the African continent, particularly with reference to water, it is easy to essentialise one singular narrative of the situation at hand. It is through such tendencies that we derive homogenising frameworks, such as that of a "human ecology", defined by professors at the University of California, Davis as the biological basis for human behaviour. We have learnt that how this assumes that human behaviour is homogeneous, when it is in fact grossly disparate between individuals, (presumably) on the basis of their multiple intersecting identities. In social and cultural geography, we give much attention to intersectionality, examining how each of these multiple identities we hold – perhaps we're African, and/or female, and/or gay, and/or poor – holds different levels of social or cultural power, which facilitate or hinder certain choices, and even interact with each other to create different outcomes.

It is through this that gender enters the picture. Access to water is not a singular uniform process. Globally, women are often culturally and institutionally disempowered — we see this from the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), both of which specifically note gender equality as an unachieved goal hindering the progress of humanity (see Figures 1 & 2). Furthermore, the specific structures and cultural norms which dictate what women can and cannot do almost always implicate water, given its role as a primary commodity or constituent in almost all human activity.

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Figure 1: Millennium Development Goals for 2015

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Figure 2: Sustainable Development Goals for 2030

In Africa specifically, we see the importance of water to agriculture. A whopping 83.1% of water is withdrawn for agriculture in Africa, compared to just 12.6% for domestic use. On a continent where agriculture is the primary driver to the economy, uninhibited access to water is, for palpable reasons, crucial for the success of the agricultural industry. Yet, access to water is made disproportionately difficult for women, who play an equally (if not more) prevalent role in agriculture. This demonstrates how sexist social norms and historical prejudices are frustratingly prioritised over food security and development.

For instance, certain social norms surrounding women may not be congruent with certain forms of water extraction for agriculture, as suggested by Villholth (2013). She discusses the degree to which groundwater irrigation specifically suits the “roles and capabilities of women” in Sub-Saharan Africa; quoting firstly women’s historical exclusion from land inheritance and thus the capital required to invest in irrigation equipment, and secondly the pressure on women to spend their time fulfilling “traditional “women’s”” chores” such as fetching firewood and, rather ironically, bringing food and water to their husbands working in the fields. Thus, though groundwater offers a stable alternative to otherwise fluctuant, weather-dependent surface waters, and hence such immense potential to increase yield – we see how the historical exploitation of female labour and institutional barriers to female autonomy impede African agricultural development and food security.

It is precisely because of this that we must question narratives of Africa as necessarily "water-scarce". We have criticised ethnocentric definitions of "water scarcity", for failing to consider that the overall demand for water on the continent just may not be as high as in other regions. Could improving access to water in Africa, then, be merely a matter of increasing equitability? Women, whether in agriculture or in the household, find water, prepare water, use water; women are water. Perhaps gender is the answer to improving the relationship between Africa and its water.

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