1. Introduction 3 Understanding women’s economic and social rights 10
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3.8 Water and sanitation
The water literature on gender reflects women’s unique relationship with water, as well as with sanitation and hygiene. Globally, gendered division of labor in water collection shows that women and girls together represent 75 per cent of household water collectors, and that in some countries the proportion reaches up to 90 per cent.347 According to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply and Sanitation this “creates significant burden, especially when the time taken to collect water is considerable.”348 According to a combined analysis of 25 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, women spend at least 16 million hours per day collecting water compared to 6 million hours spent by men.349 This is a significant burden in terms of time, as well as in terms of labor. Often, women and girls must travel great distances and carry heavy loads. In fact, evidence suggests that women and girls will carry water equaling up to 20 kilograms (or slightly over 44 pounds, which is the weight of 20 liters of water).350 Repetitively, this kind of chronic exertion can lead to back and joint problems, as well as acute injury such as sprains and fractures from falls. In some countries, spending three, four or five hours each day, every day, collecting water is not unusual.351 In Africa, UN-Water reports that forty billion working hours, or 25 per cent of household time, are spent each year carrying water.352 And for these working hours, it is overwhelmingly women who are performing the work, almost all of it is unpaid, a dimension which is not often investigated or discussed. The need for women’s unpaid labor – including vis-à-vis the time and effort it takes to meet daily water and sanitation needs – also often increases with shocks, such as those associated with climate change, the AIDS pandemic or economic restructuring.353 Water is life, and the reality is that the collection of water must take priority over other activities. As such, this responsibility in practice prevents women and girls from engaging in other meaningful activities, including going to school, running a business, taking care of other personal responsibilities, or having time left over for rest and recreation.354 Over time, this detrimentally affects women’s health and wellbeing, their ability to access education and their ability to earn a livelihood.355 Moreover, because of their domestic roles and responsibilities women are also the ones in greatest physical contact with contaminated water and human waste.356 This fact alone exposes them to a host of biological pathogens and chemical hazards which negatively affect health, including when disposing of their own family’s waste.357 In many communities women must also walk a long distance to use toilet facilities, often risking their personal safety. There is an increased incidence of sexual and physical assault for women when toilets are in a remote location. In rural areas where toilets may be unavailable, deforestation and loss of vegetation have forced women and girls to rise earlier in the mornings and to walk further in search of privacy.358 In addition to those personal security issues, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Gender and Water Alliance (GWA), the International Water and Sanitation Centre (IRC), Cap-Net and the Global Water Partnership (GWP), women are also acutely affected by the absence of sanitary latrines for the following reasons: 1) When women have to wait until dark to defecate and urinate in the open they tend to drink less during the day, resulting in all kinds of health problems such as urinary tract infections (UTIs); 2) Hygienic conditions are often poor at public defecation areas, leading to worms and other water-borne diseases, which women often have to deal with because of their care-giving roles; and 3) Girls, particularly after puberty and after the onset of menses, miss school due to lack of proper sanitary facilities.359 The UN Special Rapporteur on Water and Sanitation (Catarina de Albuquerque) has similarly raised concern within the context of her field missions about that fact that women and girls are overwhelmingly tasked with collecting water and must spend an inordinate amount of time searching for water.360 She has also raised concern over the fact that, while collecting water, women and girls are physically and sexually threatened, abused and assaulted. Women’s rights to water and sanitation with a focus on economic crisis In many countries, privatization of social services has been a common response to economic crisis. The Government of Greece, for example, has moved to privatize State-owned services, including water and energy. 361 While privatization in and of itself does not necessarily violate women’s economic and social rights, it can at times amount to a retrogressive measure if it is done without the proper processes and safeguards in place. Privatization hits women both in terms of lost jobs in the public sector, and diminished access to quality services. From the standpoint of women’s jobs, advocates have warned that: “It is becoming clearer that if public sector jobs are replaced at all, it is by outsourcing of public services to the private sector, with poor pay and terms and conditions.”362 Additionally, the impact of water privatization illustrates well how women carry a disproportionate burden when social services that were once public become private. The Interagency Task Force on Gender and Water highlights that “[a] majority of the world’s poor, women are significantly affected when water services are privatized. When the price of water increases, the burden on women as caregivers and household and economic providers also increases.”363 UNDP, GWA, IRC, Cap-Net and GWP highlight further that for women, privatization means an increase in water user rates and thus affects poor people negatively, particularly poor women and female-headed households and, furthermore, that privatization of water and sanitation fails to take into account community water management experiences and a gender perspective. 364 Others similarly report: Poor women, as managers of household and community water and related responsibilities, have been first to signal problems with water privatization, including: astronomical price hikes, in some cases consuming a large portion of monthly income; water cut-offs due to unpaid bills; lack of accountability mechanisms for users; deterioration of water quality; and hygiene issues. In some instances, poor and working women have been forced to decide between paying for water and feeding their children.365 In order to protect against these kinds of situations, clear rules and regulations are needed to ensure that privatization does not negatively affect poor households, and in particular women and female-headed households.366 |