Recognising women as water users outside the home

Gender inequality in terms of water access can be defined at a number of levels in Africa: the water supply sector, sanitation, agricultural use and environmental transformation (CAP-NET and GWA, 2006). This blog post will give some insight into the issue in the context of agriculture and irrigation following Zwarteveen’s (1997) paper.

One issue which Zwarteveen (1997) highlights, and is something that will come to influence my own analysis of the issue, is the perspective from which gender inequality in water access is analysed. From an agricultural perspective, water rights are crucial to irrigation as a way of introducing water into the market, hindered by institutional and technical deficiencies. However, a gendered approach would argue that water rights not only hold potential for agricultural development, but also social development in the form of female empowerment.

Ultimately, water rights inequality reflect existing social relations in a community or society. There is a misconception that different uses of water in society are dictated by the different roles of men and women, for example, men working in the field and women in the domestic sphere. However, on the contrary, gender difference in water use actually originates in the unequal water rights in the first place, rather than the different roles embodied by men and women in a culture. Hence, in the context of irrigation, the biggest hindrance to equal access to water “is the astounding lack of recognition of women as irrigators and water users” (Zwarteveen, 1997: 1346).