Africa, Women and Water: a Gender Disparity

Social distancing and self-isolation are essential in slowing the spread of COVID-19. This is considerably more challenging without access to a household toilet. Shared facilities pose a greater risk as they are more likely to be a source of both airborne and contact exposures to the disease, especially if there is not adequate water and soap ( Caruso et al, 2020 ).  Who is at most risk? 32% of sanitation in urban Sub-Saharan Africa is shared. Women are disproportionately at risk due to more frequent use for meeting their own needs such as menstruation, but also for assisting dependents. Open defecation practices may increase to avoid the potential risks at facilities. However, this untreated human waste can spread deadly and chronic diseases in the environment ( Caruso et al, 2020 ). The pandemic has highlighted the importance of everyone having access to clean water to prevent the spread and has exposed how governments have continually neglected to invest in clean water, soap a

This year’s World Toilet Day theme is sustainable sanitation and climate change which I will touch on more in an upcoming post. Today I want to assess gendered implications surrounding toilets. What have toilets got to do with gender? Firstly, much of the design, planning and management of public toilets are dominated by males, meaning the public toilet best suits the male body ( Nath, 2018 ). WaterAid put together a ‘Female-Friendly Public and Community Toilets’ guide for local authorities which aims to improve the understanding of female requirements concerning public toilets ( WaterAid, 2018 ). The video below summarises the content of this guide. Furthermore, Amnesty International analysed women’s experiences in Nairobi’s informal settlements, shedding light on the gendered implications of unsafe sanitation. Inadequate access to toilets increased women’s vulnerability to rape and gender-based violence partly due to the distance women must travel to access a toilet, especially at ni

This week’s post looks at a key invention that allows water to be rolled along the ground in a container rather than carried on the head. This reduces the number of trips to a water source as well as alleviating the strain on the body. Wello designed their WaterWheel with women in mind.  Women spend a significant amount of time collecting water each day which could be used for more productive means.  They also noted that headloading can lead to chronic pain which in turn leads to serious complications during childbirth. Their WaterWheel has halved collection times and improved access to water (50%). Women and children have more time for work and education and consequently, a 20-100% increase in income was observed ( wello, 2020 ).  A video demonstrating the benefits of the WaterWheel The wheel underwent a two-year trial process across India in order to ensure that it met the needs of communities. It  has a 45L capacity meaning it is much more efficient than headloading, as twice as muc