Water in Africa: A Feminist Perspective

Period poverty is the lack of sanitary products, menstrual education, toilets facilities and/or menstrual waste management (Global Citizen, 2019). Period poverty is an important part of the water and development agenda as women face increased hygiene requirements whilst menstruating. Consequently, women are even more vulnerable to health risks from poor water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities (Kayser et al., 2019). Barriers faced by African women menstruating due to poor sanitation and water facilities (SDG 6) triggers the need to target multiple SDGs to improve the well-being (SDG 3), education (SDG 4), employment capability (SDG 8) and equality (SDG 5) of women. In this post, I will introduce some problems faced by women menstruating in Africa and solutions implemented to improve their menstrual hygiene management (MHM). Critically, period poverty not only implicates a woman's reproductive health but also has wider implications upon their socio-economic development. Sub...

The title of the blog was a quote said by my friend who caught me writing up my last blog post in which I highlighted the struggles that some  Africa  women face when using the toilet. Still, this is difficult to imagine for those of us who don’t have to think twice about where, when or how we use the toilet. Though yesterday, whilst reading more into WASH in Africa, I came across this video:   Source: Water Aid, 2012 I know this is a slight diversion from what I set out to cover in my previous post, but I believe it is a necessary one. Putting African women’s realities in a striking context in which we are more familiar with can help privileged people, like my friend and I, to understand just a fraction of the difficulty faced by women in developing nations.  

World Toilet Day came and went, but the global sanitation issue still remains ever-present. Issues of inadequate sanitation are most prominent in urban areas (Govender et al., 2011) ; in Africa, where 1 in 7 individuals live in urban slums, public toilet and bathing facilities are frequently lacking in their quality and quantity.    For this post, I will explore how women are particularly disadvantaged by poor quality sanitation facilities. Whilst many credible journals detail the nexus between poor sanitation and women’s development, I’m focusing on a   study of slums in Nairobi, Kenya conducted by Amnesty International   that interviewed female slum dwellers directly on their experience of using sanitation facilities. Whilst this post is not exhaustive of the many sanitation-related issues that women face, illuminating the lived experiences of women is one way in which their sanitation needs will be exemplified. Figure 1: Faeces disposal in a slum in Nairobi Source...

Source: World Toilet Day website Happy World Toilet Day:  a day dedicated to raising awareness about the global sanitation crisis, in which  4.2 billion people   worldwide lack adequate sanitation.  In this blog post, carrying on with the underlying theme of development, I aim to neatly contextualise the position of sanitation in the water and development agenda and its relation to women. In Africa, around 65% of the population depend upon in-situ sanitation, mostly pit latrines, and around 10% have no sanitation system whatsoever (Adelana and MacDonald, 2008) .  In a world where more people today have access to a mobile phone than a toilet; these figures are pretty shocking ( Thieme, 2017 ).   Presently in urban municipalities, there is a lack of clean toilets and washrooms nearby to its users. Individuals resort to unhygienic coping strategies resulting in severe health complications. After considering these sanitation issues, I can't even think of a mome...

Excusing last week’s diversion, I'm back talking all things women and water development. This post will zoom into an NGO; the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF) and its implementation of gender mainstreaming processes to improve drinking water resources for the Obudu   town.  Over the last decade, there has been a shift from top-down development strategies managed by large scale institutions towards participatory development. Although still debated, larger-scale institutions have ultimately lacked focus on the diverse needs of the community, focusing heavily on financial returns ( Chambers,1995 ). Participatory development offers an alternative solution in which  local people  work " with" vs "for" NGOs to influence initiatives which will directly affect their own development .  However, NGOs may participate in performative activism or tokenistic development strategies, leading to wide contestation of their effectiveness. However, if effective, partici...

Last time, I concluded that for this post, I would zoom into a management strategy associated with women and water collection in Africa. However, as I was scrolling through The Times, I came across an interesting title… Source: The Times On Wednesday of this week, Comic Relief pledged to stop sending “white saviour” celebrities to Africa and produce fundraising appeals with a “more authentic perspective” made by local " young black and brown-film" . The charity who famously host “Red Nose Day” will stop using images of critically ill or starved individuals as homogenous members of the population in efforts to represent the continent more realistically.    Importantly, this news takes me back to my first post of the blog whereby I reflected on Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical piece on ‘How to Write About Africa’ . These new Comic Relief guidelines of storytelling will elucidate the narratives and diversity of the continent, including the voices of women. These voices are yet t...