Kenya's Water Crisis Aggravating Sexual and Gender Based Violence

This week's blog will focus around the issue of Kenya's water crisis aggravating sexual and gender based violence. The reason for this choice is two-fold; firstly, it will emphasise the urgency in needing to integrate gender into environmental policy and to also highlight a common theme that has run throughout the blog; how issues surrounding water, such as water insecurity, disproportionately affect women in the developing world. 

As families in Kenya compete for diminishing resources, domestic violence is on the rise. This can be exemplified through the drought that is happening in Samburu county, Kenya. Appallingly, over half of the people living in Samburu County collect their water from unsafe sources such as contaminated shallow wells and seasonal rivers. The river has very little water and what remains is contaminated by animal waste. It can take twenty minutes of scooping out sand from the ground before water begins to emerge at the bottom. Further, many men have turned to sand harvesting which has left the riverbed bare and unable to retain water during the dry season. If this sand harvesting continues, the women fear that they will have to walk longer distances to find water, positioning them at more risk of violence and sexual molestation. The increased vulnerability to violence remains a significant and under-addressed aspect of the global water and sanitation challenge (Sommer et al., 2015)

Children in Samburu county, digging in the dried Ewaso Nyiro Riverbed. Source: The Guardian

The article by Muiruri, narrates the account of multiple women who are having to endure the effects of such "drought instigated violence." There is growing evidence that there are direct links between environmental pressures and gender based-violence (Carney et al. 2020). As nature begins to degrade, competition regarding increasingly scarce resources and environmental crime all contribute to aggravating violence. In fact, environmental degradation is now recognised as a driver of gender-based violence (Csevár, 2021). The scarcity in resources and displacement caused by the degradation only helps to reinforce existing gender inequalities. For example, in Samburu County, men have been forced to move remaining livestock to tens of kilometres away in an attempt to find foliage. This in turn has dramatically increased the risk of the women. This problem is not isolated to solely Kenya, for example, in Zimbabwe after cyclone Idai in 2019, there was a demonstrated rise in intimate partner violence rates (Chatiza, 2019). 

 

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) published this infographic regarding demonstrating the shocking risk females experience on a daily basis. Source: IUCN

What particularly struck me, demonstrated by the infographic above, is the quotidian nature of the violence these women are experiencing. Further, a study by WASH about gender-based violence mentioned an element of the issue I hadn't yet considered, that being the unreported nature of much of the violence experienced by the women and girls. The figures that are represented in academic literature and online are just the tip of the iceberg. Further, the gender based violence experienced comes in various forms whether that be structural violence (Collins et al. 2019) or psychological violence (Cooper-Vince et al. 2018).

 

Solutions?

Through researching the interlinkage between water, gender and violence I stumbled across this study which proposes the notion of an integrated theoretical framework for understanding water insecurity and gender-based violence. The study speaks of how the disparity in access to resources such as water is largely due to a power imbalance much like what Kameri-Mbote spoke of in "Water is Life". Academics have used previously frameworks such as the Feminist political ecology framework to illuminate ideas of vulnerability emerging from unequal power relations. This study instead proposes a Feminist Political Ecology of Health framework which more successfully addresses the intersectional problems that are associated to water insecurity and gender-based violence. It is only through navigating through these socio-cultural and power relations that the context for understanding gender-based violence can be realised (Van Anken & De Donato, 2018). The proposed framework creates the opportunity to explore the complex intertwined relationship between water insecurity and gender-based violence. 

 

Linking back to COP26, it is clear that the safety of the women in areas like Samburu relies heavily on the efforts being made at this crucial event. Now more than ever, there needs to be gender-responsive approaches to environmental policy and for this to be possible there needs to be a more systematic, reliable and ethically conducted monitoring of this topic to help refine key principles for improved policy (Sommer et al. 2015).