women and water

Girl collecting water in Kenya;
from The Water Project. 

For many Kenyans, climate change has very real consequences for daily life: many people will have to hours to get drinking water from increasingly scarce water sources. Water sources can be 2-5 km away, with people carrying 5-20 litres of water per trip, and some families using 100 litres of water per day. Water-gathering is so important that it is valued higher than the cost of unskilled labor. However, the majority of water collecting is done by women or girls. Similarly, many traditional gender roles in Kenyan communities mean that changes in precipitation with climate change will disproportionately affect Kenyan women and girls.
walk

In Kenyan communities, many chores traditionally thought of as "women's tasks" are much more connected to natural resource management than are traditional "men's tasks." Traditional women's tasks include domestic chores such as water collection, as well as cooking, cleaning, health- and childcare, and often farming; about half of all farmers in Kenya are female. Conversely, men are more often involved in economic and social pursuits within their community. Because women's tasks involve water availability and sanitation, women will be disproportionately affected by changes in water access resulting from more droughts or rainfall variability under climate change.

Potential impacts of climate change on women in Kenya; from NEMA.

Provision of water resources is generally recognized as a critical way of empowering women, because it frees up women's time and energy, and also improves health, reducing the need for female-provided healthcare. In addition, women walk a long way to get water, and often suffer the threat of violence on their walks away from home. Finally, if water is difficult to get, some girls even skip school to make trips to collect water; in a study in Morocco, girls' school attendance increased when access to water improved.

Kenyan women generally have had less decision-making power than men, including decision-making power concerning water provision, in spite of their disproportionate stake in water resource management. Men have generally controlled both the social and political aspects of decision-making, with women at the grassroots level often barred from decision-making processes. This attitude in part arose because women's domestic labor is not seen as economically-valuable "real work".

Denittah Ghati, a representative in the governmental coalition
designed to decrease gender disparity in water politics,
speaking to rural farmers. From Thomson-Reuters. 

However, due in part to the the increasingly large fraction of small-scale female farmers, as well as increased representation in government bodies, these long-held ideas about gender roles in water provisioning are being challenged at both the grassroots level and at the national scale. For example, a coalition among female representatives in Kenya's government, founded on small-scale community support, has called for an increased awareness of women's role in farming and water provisioning when designing policies. This organization has worked mainly with small farmers in rural areas, striving to empower women by making them more involved in local administrative structures' policy-making.

In a similar vein, the Kenyan government has outlined goals and tactics for decreasing the gender disparity in water politics and climate change in a recent report. This report highlights three main tactics for mitigating the effects of climate change on women: first, adaptation and mitigation strategies should consider the role of gender. Second, women should be actively involved in climate change decision making and planning. Finally, because poverty often accentuates climate change impacts, especially for underprivileged groups, the government should create a fund to support the economic activities of women. While this plan has yet to be implemented on the large scale, it provides a concrete framework for addressing gender disparity issues.

Many traditional gender roles in Kenya mean that changes in water availability and rainfall with climate change will disproportionately affect Kenyan women and girls. There has already been substantial progress made on this front, at both the grassroots and national level. In subsequent posts I will discuss the effects of increased precipitation on another issue that concerns women in their role as healthcare providers, malaria transmission.