Water and Sanitation Issues are Gendered

 Hi and welcome back to the blog! In this post I hope to convey that water and sanitation issues are not just physical but social and heavily gendered. It is very important that we understand the social context of water and sanitation issues are so that we are able to develop or implement solutions that are effective.

When we consider the issue of sanitation and open defecation in Africa we often fall into the trap of oversimplifying the problem and attributing open defecation to a lack of toilets or poorly built pit latrines. This is sometimes true but the complexity lies within the social contexts.

Ask yourself this:

Would I use a toilet if the stall was full of flies/smelled? 

The presence of flies is a simple yet significant example that shows how sanitation issues are, in fact, quite social. More importantly, Tsinda's study in Kigali, Rwanda suggests smell and the presence of flies was actually a contributing factor to latrine usage. The same was found by Kwiringa in Kampala, Uganda. 

Gendered, like I said

It would be difficult to fully understand issues without considering gender.

 Amnesty International found that women  were already more likely to experience sexual and other gender-based forms of violence and that this was exacerbated by inadequate sanitation services. 

"How can this be?" I see you thinking. Well, there are public toilets that operate on a pay-per-use basis and usually close at night. This is very important.

Firstly, these are only available to women that are fortunate enough to have the money for them. In most cases, the money used for toilets could be better spent on food and children and so are avoided. Unfortunately, it is also a reality that the men tend to carry the money as the head of the households. 

Secondly, women that are fortunate enough will have to resort to other methods of excretion at night because it's not like you don't pee and poo at night.

 At night, when most latrines closed, women had to use shared latrines usually not situated within the plot in which their houses or structures were situated. They also had to walk a fair distance to access this facility. Most women have to "walk more than 300 metres from their homes" to use the available latrines. 

Access to the latrines is especially unsafe for women and particularly at night. Amnesty's interviewees all mentioned an "ever present danger of sexual and other forms of gender-based violence".  Using shared latrines at night increases the risk of being a victim of violent/sexual crime.

Women have tried to reduce this risk by asking friends or male relatives to accompany them. However, if possible, they avoid using shared latrines at night at all and have come up with creative alternatives.

For example  the use of 'flying toilets'; a term used to describe a plastic bag used to collect human faeces. In case you are as unsure as I was of how flying toilets work:

The person defecates into an open, empty plastic bag from the safety of their home (the toilet part), ties the plastic bag and throws them into ditches or on the side of the road ( the 'flying'). 

Here's what I thought a flying toilet was:

man flying a toilet source

and here's what it is:

illustration of a flying toilet by PeePoo source

If you're a guy, you may be thinking "well can't you just go in a bush?"

This is possible, sure, but for women it is frowned upon and even then, open defecation is still a problem as I've mentioned in previous posts.

 In places like Kibera, the culture is quite patriarchal whereby men are the heads of their households. This makes it particularly difficult when thinking of solutions that can effectively address women's needs. 

For example, in Winter's research, some women had suggested having more money could help access public toilets regularly (although this would still not solve their problem once the toilets close at night). This may solve problems for some women but it would have to be their own to spend. Still, the money could be better spent on children's education or food.

Khanna & Das have suggested that there are programmes that provide microfinance and subsidies to women to actually build toilets since they need it more than men. However, the lack of decision-making power in the home made it difficult to ensure money was spent on toilets. 

Understanding metrics

I think this is a good opportunity to mention the need to apply this need for understanding water and sanitation issues to metrics. Through better understanding what the metrics show (or more importantly, what they don't), we can better understand the issue. 

Thompson's study provides a great example of how the ways that we measure things are taken for what they are at first glance and don't actually show the entire truth. In this case, in East Africa, the average distance that unpiped households walked to obtain their water did not change significantly between 1967  and 1997 (222 to 204 metres). There was even a slight decrease in distance.

The number of trips increased from 2.61 per day in '67 to 3.96 in '97. Theoretically, time spent collecting water should be closely related to the distance to the source. In practice, what was found was that whilst the increase in daily distance to source was not significant, the time spent collecting water each day increased more than 3 times (from 27.7 minutes in 1960s to 91.7 minutes in 1990s). The largest explanatory factor was the increased time spent in queues. In other words: more people were making more trips to the same source. 

If we only look at coverage or even distance from household to source, we'd fail to understand the supply has not kept up with a growing demand. 

Why have I mentioned this?

Well, other than this being a good example of why context is important, this task of collecting water whereby almost 2 hours are spent per person everyday, is usually assigned to women. It is the women that lose out again. This time, it's their time that suffers rather than their safety and comfort.