Mobilising resources

While female empowerment has the potential to offer new ideas and perspectives to water management, a lack of financial resources is often a key limitation on achieving change (UN, 2006). Though funding for such projects is offered by external financial actors, such as charity donors, these are insufficient to solve the entirety of the water issues in Africa. This means that there is a reliance on public funds, for example raised through taxation, borrowing and cross subsidisation, to support water and sanitation needs. As such, governments remain central to water management.

A particularly interesting example here is the Mabule Sanitation Project in South Africa (Poku Sam, 2006). This project, funded by the Mvula Trust, is led by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) of South Africa, with focus on community engagement. In order to stimulate female participation, the DWAF offers extra funding to communities where there is improved gender equality in decision-making. In the Mabule village, this manifested in a brick-making programme, in which the majority of employees were female, the produce of which was used to build toilets. As a result, not only did the village experience improved sanitation from the latrines, but there was also an increasing acceptance of women in leadership rolesx, as well as better collaboration between men and women in the working environment.