Skip to main content

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:

  1. "It takes averagely 20 hours a week for women to gather drinking water in sub-Saharan Africa 
  2. 2/3 of those displaced by the climate crisis in Adenike’s region of Lack Chad are women 
  3. 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).


      Image title: empower our girls, empower the world: an international women’s day message from Nigeria

Comments

  1. Clement21 November 2021 at 04:17

    Good introduction with engagement with literature, and references are well embeded

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Access to clean water is an issue of gender inequality, period.

This week, the lecture focus was sanitation. As a result, I wanted to look into the term "period poverty". I have heard this term countless times and yet I have never looked into how this issue plays out in real time.  One of the definitions for 'period poverty' or menstrual health management (MHM) was not having access to soap and water to be able to wash during menstruation, as well as not having access to facilities where menstrual products can be disposed of correctly ( Tull, 2019 ). Period poverty is therefore clearly related to the problem of access to clean water.  Research by UNICEF has highlighted a shocking statistic that '65% of females in Kibera... had traded sex for sanitary pads due to the prevalence of period poverty and the shame, stigma and public health misinformation which surrounds menstruation' ( ibid ). Though it is important to acknowledge that this statistic is only indicative of the wider issue (and UNICEF Kenya stated that this inform...
4 comments
Read more

Don't COP out of tackling gender inequality

COP26 , the upcoming climate conference being held in Glasgow between 31st October and 12th November, provides an interesting opportunity to examine the role that women are playing in Africa's current fight on climate change.  In my previous blog post, I looked at Oladosu Adenike's Guardian  article entitled " It makes economic sense for women to lead the fight against the climate crisis ", in which she stated that women in sub-Saharan Africa specifically are 'bearing the brunt of a crisis they did nothing to cause' which is the quote I would like to open this second blog post with (2021).  Urmilla Bob and Agnes Babugura, both South African academics, wrote an interesting overview of the relationship between gender and climate change in Africa in their paper entitled " Contextualising and conceptualising gender and climate change in Africa " (2014). They highlight the fact that it was at COP13 in Bali, 2007, where the Global Gender and Climate Allia...
2 comments
Read more

Mind the Gender Pay Gap

As has been highlighted in the comments of several of my previous blog posts, one of the biggest barriers to gender equality is financial inequality.  As was stated by Asongu et al. in their paper " Inequality and gender economic inclusion: The moderating role of financial access in Sub-Saharan Africa ", 'women in the sub-[Saharan] region are the poorest and least included in the formal economy in the world and the exclusion of women represents a significant waste of development resources. No society can sustainably develop (politically, economically and socially) if the majority of its population is excluded from contributing to economic development ' (2020).  In fact, 'the cost of gender exclusion in the sub-region is estimated at about 2.5 trillion USD' ( ibid ). This amount of money would make a huge difference to achieving targets 6.1 and 6.2 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), referring to access to drinking water and sanitation. In fact, a Unice...
2 comments
Read more