Water and Gender in Africa

Across many Sub-Saharan African countries, women are the main providers of food security for their families and are heavily involved in the different stages of smallholder farms from sowing to post-harvesting. Despite women accounting for 70% of smallholder farmers in Africa, only 20% has formal access to land (Abass, 2018) . Villholth’s (2013:380) gave me an insight into small holder farms as a significantly gendered issue and the constraints of securing formal tenure rights which cumulatively leads to the disparity in farm credits, access to farming tools and technology and information available for women in crop production. This denies women in their rights for survival and lifting them out of the poverty cycle.   Agriculture sustains the economic livelihood of up to 70% of Sub Saharan Africa’s working population (Muzari, 2014) . Agriculture has long been a tool in sustaining food security, alleviation from poverty and stimulating economic growth, however Sub-Sah...

I particularly want to dedicate this post to explore gender sanitation strategies in informal settlements after the seminar on urban sanitation as it provided me with insights into the role of market-based sanitation strategies initiated in the challenges faced by informal settlements ie. Temporality of landscape linked with political unwillingness, high population densities and land rights. This links back to my findings in the 2 nd post that access to water affects women disproportionately in informal settlements. I will evaluate existing sanitation strategies in empowering women, particularly the Peepoo bags, Sanergy toilets and Iko toilet in the Nairobi slums in Kenya. To contextualize the issues with gender and water sanitation in informal settlements, I will begin with an overview of the macro to micro development of sanitary systems in East Africa and the Kibera slum of Narobi respectively. Since the post-colonial era, water supply servicing and waste collec...