6. Gender mainstreaming in practice

The approach has been to identify key gender-related issues, outline ways of addressing each issue, and illustrate the recommendations with specific global or national examples.

Identification and feasibility studies

Issue: Women and girls do most of the household tasks including water-related tasks
Ways forward: Optimise time gains from water improvements to benefit women and girls via education, income generation or rest and relaxation
Example: Dosso, Niger. Gender workshops helped to increase women’s involvement, change hygiene behaviour of men and women and improve men’s contributions to water payments.

Issue: Multisectoral uses of water by women and men, rich and poor are insufficiently recognised
Ways forward: Programme developers and project planners address water and land use holistically
Example: Rajasthan, India. Women led a rainwater harvesting project and combined it with a ban on cutting forests. With less time required to collect water, fodder and fuel wood, girls can now attend school. The project is being replicated in more villages.

Issue: Along with domestic water management, hygiene and sanitation are seen as “women’s issues”
Ways forward: Improve school sanitation and hygiene education for boys and girls and shared responsibility for cleaning and latrine maintenance
Example: Gender and poverty project, Nepal. A committed male community worker has convinced men to participate in health education, with positive results in terms of behavioural change and attitudes to women.

Issue: Women and girls suffer the most from inadequate sanitation facilities
Ways forward: Design toilets to suit women’s needs; target women with income-generating activities linked to sanitation improvements; enable women to contribute other than in cash.

Issue: Gender also means targeting men
Ways forward: Focus on the daily lives of both men and women and seek win-win scenarios in changing household roles
Example: Gujarat, India. A long process of conflict resolution led to better access to water for both domestic and economic uses for the women. Men recognised the resulting benefits and were willing to take over domestic tasks when women were doing paid work.

Issue: Women’s issues are often discussed in project formulation but do not appear with the same priority in project documents, budgets and log frames
Ways forward: Ensure that project design and evaluation procedures incorporate gender-sensitive indicators and involve women.

Design and formulation

Issue: Discrimination and women’s multiple responsibilities make it difficult for women to participate fully in project planning
Ways forward: Facilitators consult women about timing and location of meetings and help to organise support for domestic duties, etc, while women attend. Involve social groups to stimulate women’s participation
Example: SEWA, Gujarat, India. The Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) was the driving force behind a watershed development programme that overcame male opposition to women’s participation and produced significant benefits.

Issue: Women are seldom consulted on the range of technology options and the actual design of facilities
Ways forward: Include women from the start in technology choice, service level, design, construction, affordability and willingness to pay
Example: Nepal. A negative example of how lack of consultation with women meant that tapstands and tubewells are located in inappropriate places, adding to the women’s burdens because they have to carry water home to obtain privacy.

Implementation

Issue: Women are not consulted on issues related to project implementation.
Ways forward: Avoid blueprint approaches, use participatory learning and a gender analysis
Example: Mindanao, Philippines. Attempts to involve first young men and later women in monitoring of a watershed management project had little success until women learned how the improved water quality could impact on health. The project then expanded, with positive outcomes.

Issue: Men do not consider women as being capable of doing work normally done by men and women’s contributions to projects are underpaid
Ways forward: Capacity building to improve and demonstrate women’s capabilities for “non-traditional” work
Example: Gujarat, India. Persistent action by SEWA overcame resistance to women handpump mechanics. After refusal by the water utility to provide training, NGO training equipped the barefoot mechanics for their task, with a huge improvement in handpump maintenance.

Issue: Increasing workloads of women who participate in water projects can lead to additional problems for the women
Ways forward: Men need to be shown that a more gender-sensitive approach is also going to benefit them and encouraged to take on domestic chores without losing face
Example: South India. Following a gender training programme involving time-activity profiles for men and women, men accepted that they would benefit from improved drinking water supplies when women’s time was freed for income generation.

Operation and maintenance

Issue: Women in management often improve maintenance and sustainability of domestic water supplies, but face resistance from men
Ways forward: Involve women in ways that does not add to their other burdens (particularly important, as O&M involves a permanent workload
Example: Dominican Republic. Women have been found to be willing to pay the monthly fees knowing that the maintenance fund is controlled by women. This is in a country where O&M of rural water systems is a major problem and men take over water committees.

Monitoring and evaluation

Issue: Women’s and children’s unpaid contributions are often not documented in programme activities. This makes it difficult to assess the impact of their involvement
Ways forward: Use gender-sensitive indicators to produce sex-disaggregated data and include unpaid contributions
Assistance: The United Nations International Task Force on Gender and Water is developing a set of core indicators for water and sanitation.