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.
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Your post engages with some weighty debates in development - this is commendable. Be sure to reflect the reading that you have done to inform these arguments in your post. Do also make sure that cite work (e.g. Crow et al., 2011) has a clear hyperlink to the original reference.
ReplyDeleteOn the specific argument as "to attack the very structures which perpetuate gendered public-private dichotomies to begin with", is it your view that these necessarily need to be tackled if the symptom - disproportionate burden of inadequate water supply and sanitation on women is to be addressed?