Women's Promotion of Environmental Sanitation
Mwangola, Margaret (1997).
Paper presented at KWAHO sponsored "Role of Women in Gender Development Workshop" held in Pretoria, South Africa, 24-26 November,1997.
The trend towards women's participation in the management and sustainability of water supply and sanitation projects is gaining prominence. It is now necessary to promote gender roles without exploiting the contributions made by women. Women assume the leading role when technology is simple, but their participation declines when technology is complicated and expensive. Women must be empowered through participatory training, leadership and management seminars, and skills workshops to assume a greater involvement in the management of WSS projects. However, this paper asserts that projects are more successful when training involves both gender groups, as this promotes confidence and reduces mistrust especially about ownership of finances for the project. For best results, committees must be composed of both men and women who are given different but interrelated roles and training to allow effective gender balance and occupational roles. Women's promotion is reflected in behavioural changes such as new insight into issues, increased time and opportunities for women's participation previously marred by customs and taboos, and greater influence in the family, schools and other local institutions particularly regarding health behaviours. The focus for both genders must now become the management of water as a scarce resource, training in fund raising, and local responsibility for such skills development as pipe laying, masonry, sinking wells, and community-based water quality analysis projects.
It is essential to promote gender equality so that as women carry a bigger share of the responsibility for community water supply and sanitation, men do not adopt a lesser role in the sector. When projects are visited, women are found to have more information on aspects affecting their daily lives while men discuss more abstract things such as mosques or markets. Efforts should be made to bring men closer to their homesteads at planning and implementing level by involving both men and women in drawing up issues of interest for training. Training in gender must be made the cornerstone for the promotion of gender development throughout all existing programmes. However, care must be taken to promote women's involvement at national and international levels where presently men have prominence.
Although men are emerging as experts at village level, they do not carry water for their families. All over Africa, women will always do the physical work, particularly the unskilled labour. When work includes intermediate or higher skills, women are often pushed aside. To overcome these obstacles, the tasks of both genders must be integrated and the corresponding roles of each gender must be viewed as inseparable.
A study of three projects from KWAHO (Kenya Water for Health Organization), PALNET (Participatory Learning Network), and SHEWAS (Care Kenya) highlights remaining concerns about gender issues. Projects must be community driven to be successful and, as well, the roles of both men and women must be demand driven and accepted by each gender with no role of either gender considered inferior. Women should be given credit for successful projects and not see their success hijacked by men. It is essential in projects to promote teamwork, mobilization of resources, networking, and relevant training to address gender input for manning the sector in a more efficient manner. Focusing on sanitation information for both genders, the SHEWAS project has seen an increase in safe practices such as handwashing and a decrease in old ideas such as that children's faeces are safe, and old practices such as not sharing toilets with in-laws, or women not eating chicken or eggs.
The paper concludes that political will must be harnessed at all levels to encourage gender development in the sector and that it must be community-based and demand driven, that integration of services by men and women is vital to the welfare of sustainable programmes, and that training for all agencies and documentation of all processes is important.
