The Beginning

"Each day women and children spend 200 million hours collecting water." This startling figure was one of the first I came across when researching for this blog. Clearly demonstrated is the vast responsibility that is placed upon females with regards to water collection and the gendered impact that limited drink water services can have. Issues surrounding water disproportionately affect women and can be linked to the concept of "time poverty" something that Melina Gates describes as one of the biggest challenges of the modern era:

"Girls today will spend hundreds of thousands more hours than boys doing unpaid work simply because society assumes it's their responsibility."

Whilst perhaps concepts like "time poverty" are easy to infer when considering the inextricable link between water and gender, in this blog I am also keen to consider sensitive sub-themes such as vulnerability and water access in a case study like format, focused primarily on Kenya.

Source: UN

Much that is spoken of in the blog will refer to the Sustainable Development Goal above – SDG 6. I found this diagram very useful to visualise how the different the targets of SDG 6 can interlink. SDG 6 calls for universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water by 2030. Shockingly, in sub-Saharan Africa, one roundtrip to access water is on average thirty-three minutes in rural area and still standing at twenty-five minutes in urban areas. 

You might be wondering what has compelled me to choose the theme of Gender and Water. Through doing a BASc degree (Arts and Sciences) I will be equipped with an interdisciplinary lens to my analysis. Further, I spent this summer interning in an asset management firm where I got the opportunity to delve into the booming yet contentious ecosystem of ESG based funds and became exposed to thematic water funds which remains a sector relatively unexplored by investors (Ielasi & Rossolini, 2019). I am keen to understand from more of a nuanced ground level view what these funds are aiming to target.

Representations of Africa

When using this platform I hope to avoid representing Africa as a homogenised economic, social and political landscape (Wainaina, 2019.) Perhaps like others, when first seeing the name of the article "how to write about Africa" I was expecting to read a piece which set out a comprehensive set of guidelines.

Instead, Wainaina uses a satirical voice to provide constructive social criticism and avoid the sweeping Western generalisations and narratives that sadly precludes much of the discourse surrounding the continent; "treat Africa as if it were one country... Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions." Whilst satire is perhaps not the most typical literary technique to create an emotive piece of writing, I found it a wonderful piece of work which allowed me to reflect on how wrong and deeply embedded our Western homogenised view of Africa is.

It is also in this satirical piece that we can also draw incipient links to that of women and children-

"Among your characters you must always include The Starving African ... She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering"

Upon reading these representations it made me reflect on how even within, what I like to think of, a rather liberal childhood, distasteful references to "children dying in Africa" were often used as a rhetoric to convince one to eat their food or do other menial tasks.

I hope that in this blog I do my best to recognise Africa as a culturally diverse place with a rich heritage. I am keen to continue to educate myself and recognise that this is a responsibility that lies on myself however please leave a comment on my blog if I need to make any sensitive revisions to the content I use. I recognise that as a white female I am privileged and rather than reduce racism and white privilege to certain individuals I acknowledge that it is a system that I myself have benefitted from. I thought this epigraph by Peggy McIntosh, an anti-racism activist, articulated this well:

"I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group."

So what next?

This first blog post should give you a sufficient overview of initial links between gender and water and I look forward to going into greater detail in later weeks about the issues raised here.