Introduction: 'empower our girls, empower our world'

When beginning my research for this blog, looking at the relationship between water and gender in Africa, I was astounded by how much material was already out there on this topic; a fact which made choosing a starting point for this blog a difficult task.

Before even beginning to think about the theme of water and gender, I read Binyavanga Wainaina’s article entitled “How to Write About Africa” (2005). This was an eye-opening read and highlighted countless mistakes that are commonly made when writing about Africa, many of which I’m sure I would have made as someone that has grown up in the UK knowing very little about the continent of Africa other than that which is filtered into mainstream media. Equally, the only insight I had into “Water and Development in Africa” came from the countless appeals seen on TV during events such as Comic Relief and Red Nose Day. My lack of understanding and insight into this topic was a huge contributing factor in choosing this module and therefore, by extension, writing this blog. Having read Wainaina’s article, although I am certain I will make mistakes throughout the blogging process, I hope to tackle the theme of water and gender in a way which is current and accurate.

As an opening to this blog, I would like to focus on an Independent article by Oladosu Adenike I came across, entitled “It makes sense for women to lead the fight against the climate crisis” (2021). Many of the statistics that Adenike uses in the first few paragraphs are shocking:

"It takes averagely 20 hours a week for women to gather drinking water in sub-Saharan Africa
2/3 of those displaced by the climate crisis in Adenike’s region of Lack Chad are women
In the region of Lake Chad, around 90% of the water has disappeared in the last 50 years"

(Adenike, 2021)

Adenike summarises these issues with the statement that women both in her region and further afield across sub-Saharan Africa are ‘bearing the brunt of a crisis they did nothing to cause’ and ‘to tackle the climate crisis it’s vital that we have a gender smart approach’ (2021). This idea of a “gender smart” approach to tackling the current climate crisis is seconded by Samuel Partey who, in his journal article entitled "Gender and Climate Risk Management", highlighted the need for ‘gender-specific’ services to ‘address the constraints experienced by women’ when it came to the climate crisis in Ghana, and by extension the issue of water accessibility in the region as a whole (2020).

Adenike places female education at the centre of her proposed solution. This idea was documented by Browne and Barrett in the early 1990s, who stated that ‘female education has a double role: it promotes many other areas of human development and it can contribute both directly and indirectly to the economic advancement of poor countries’ (1991). Considering the fact that for the majority of African countries the issue lies in ‘economic water scarcity’ as opposed to ‘water resource scarcity’, the improvement of female education throughout Africa seems of the utmost importance (Gaye and Tindimugaya, 2019).