Why would water scarcity be linked to teenage pregnancies?
Many societal issues that we may think of as “gender-neutral” – i.e., affecting people equally regardless of their gender – turn out to be highly gendered on closer inspection. One of those issues is water.
Lack of access to safe drinking water is a huge problem in Sierra Leone. One third of households get their water from sources that are not protected from outside contamination, such as faecal matter. These include unprotected wells, springs, or surface water, such as rivers or lakes. This does not, however, mean that the other 70 percent have reliable access to clean water.
Almost every household (nine out of ten in Freetown) accesses water from shared taps, boreholes, and springs. The water sources often require a long walk and can be unreliable, particularly during the dry season. These problems are felt by all Sierra Leonians. However, their impact is also highly gendered.
Gendered Impact of Water Scarcity
In most households in Sierra Leone, providing water is predominantly the responsibility of women and girls. Girls may have to get up before dawn and walk long distances in search of water, particularly in the dry season. This limits the time they can spend on their education, rest, leisure, and other activities.
In many cases, men control the shared taps or boreholes and ration the water to residents. Some of the men have been reported to abuse the girls’ desperation for water and demand sexual favors in return for access to the tap.
The expression “water for water” refers to this abuse, and reports of teenage pregnancies resulting from it are common. In addition to the devastating effects of suffering abuse, the violence may put the girls’ education and future at risk, further widening the gap of inequality.
Women for Water and Peace (W4WP)
Last week, the Freetown City Council in partnership with UNCDF and ILO and implementing partners launched a program to address these problems. I was fortunate enough to be present at the launch, which took place at the Freetown City Council office.
The program, named “Women for Water and Peace” (W4WP) aims among other things to construct 25 water kiosks that provide clean and accessible for residents in vulnerable communities across Freetown. The kiosks will be managed and operated by young women as businesses.
This approach is designed to address the lack of water access while simultaneously tackling some of the pervasive gendered issues and violence surrounding water scarcity in Freetown.
The ILO describes the program in this way:
“… this project will address structural gender inequalities in two ways. First, it empowers local women and adolescent girls with decent livelihoods through the operations of the water kiosks. Also, it positions them as agents of change and controllers of water access; levelling the power imbalance with men, who currently control the limited available water resources and wield the accompanying economic power."
Gender Mainstreaming
The Women for Water and Peace program is a great example of a program that takes gender into account. One part of mine and Stuti’s work at the Freetown City Council involves developing a simple gender mainstreaming framework for the city – i.e., guidelines on how to integrate gender concerns in the analysis, formulation, and monitoring of the city’s policies, programs, and projects.
It involves exploring how issues affect men and women differently and how the program can be designed to address that difference, as well as actively seeking gender-segregated data, consulting women as well as men in the preparation stages, ensuring that women take part in decision-making, and ensuring equal access to services and programs.
Incorporating gender sensitivity into the design and delivery makes programs more responsive to the needs of all residents while tackling structural gendered imbalances. It can also uncover the nuanced ways in which issues impact residents, such as the potential link between water scarcity and teenage pregnancies.
In developing this framework in partnership with our colleagues at the City Council office, it is our hope that it will assist city leaders in developing more programs like the W4WP that are responsive to the differential needs of Freetown's residents.
The water tap down the street from our house. We often see children filling up bottles and containers there after sunset.
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