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: Amnesty Internati