Gender and WASH, and Beyond

Last week I was able to attend the Philadelphia Global Water Initiative's conference on Gender and Water: Leading Beyond the Burden. I was very encouraged by all the panelists, attendees, and speakers, and the great ideas and work that is being done to integrate gender and WASH. The intersection of women and WASH is a huge aspect of both sectors and the impacts that integrating the two could make are extremely powerful. Women and girls in Sub-Saharan Africa spend 40 billion hours each year collecting water - that's the equivalent of the entire workforce of France! It is important to incorporate women into WASH because they are the most likely to know what is needed and where.

Malaika Cheney-Coker of CARE presented a theory of change in the WASH and women setting:

Secure and sustainable access to water and services

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Gender-sensitive water and other policies, institutions and norms

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Gender-equitable control over WASH services

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Poor women and school-aged girls improve their lives.

That's what we're really all about - improving the lives of these women and girls, and we see how the integration of WASH and gender can do that. There is no one without the other. When we say water and gender we are also saying water and economy, water and development, water and health, water and quality of life.

"Women can provide [great and effective] leadership when they are not considered inconsequential receivers of charity," said one panelist. They can provide the avenues for effective services, sustainability, and huge and positive impacts. This is what we're really doing in the WASH sector, anyway. I have had multiple friends introduce me as someone who builds wells, but we do so much more and we need to start telling people about it. We need to start showing people inside and outside of the development world the impacts of what we do go so far beyond wells, even beyond health. We're impacting the livelihoods and quality of life of women, girls, children, men, old people, people with HIV, teachers, and the list goes on and on. We need to get beyond the perception of just building wells and let people know the vast amount of projects we do and impacts we have. We need to show people how integral our efforts are in their efforts, and begin such collaboration the development world has never seen before!