It is appropriate that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for Gender Equality and Clean Water and Sanitation sit side-by-side as Goal Five and Goal Six in the list of seventeen global goals. It has long been known that a lack of access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services disproportionally affects women. Women and girls’ needs related to menstrual, sexual, and reproductive health heighten their vulnerability to poor WASH services, whilst improving access to high-quality WASH services is known to improve girls’ education and empower women’s economic development. For these reasons, gender equality has become one of the key research themes within the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Water and Waste Infrastructure and Services Engineered for Resilience (Water-WISER). In this blog, Hannah, Ruth, and Georgia – three Water-WISER researchers – explain why they believe WASH researchers and practitioners need to focus on gender equality.
Ruth Sylvester, 1st Year Water-WISER student
Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) has a unique place in the lives of everyone. During the Covid-19 pandemic, it enables handwashing with soap to prevent virus transmission. For a girl on her period, it is a safe place to change her pad or cloth. For a person at work, it might be a place of privacy to recover after a tough meeting. In a refugee camp, a water truck signifies there is clean drinking water for the day. At a rural hand pump, it may be a place for women to catch-up with one another and be together in the community. WASH services cannot physically be provided without efficient technology and engineering, but a less recognised necessity is how they are used by individuals in deeply personal ways.
Sociocultural factors strongly affect how WASH is made available to people. Women and girls are known to be disproportionately affected by WASH access, for a variety of reasons. They usually perform the household domestic work, are stigmatised for sanitation-related behaviours, and have specific WASH requirements for female health and hygiene, which are often not realised by inherently patriarchal governance and technical structures. Transgender people also face shame and discrimination for which bathroom they use, due to gendered cultural attitudes and heteronormative systems design. Therefore, in places where WASH services are to some extent unavailable or unsuitable, resulting health, social and economic impacts are felt uniquely by different people groups.
Water is a national and international bio-political force, because of its connections to health, climate change and globalisation. Economically there is a huge funding gap for WASH services, with some countries requiring a 61% increase in funding to reach the targets of SDG 6. Sanitation in particular is under-recognised and under-funded. This is due to complex issues over whether sanitation is a public or a private good, particularly in legally ambiguous areas such as informal settlements, and the often delayed knock-on effects of poor service. Political and economic influences need to be addressed if WASH services are to be made more socially equitable and environmentally sustainable, and gender equity is fundamental consideration in this space.
Hannah Jayne Robinson, 2nd Year Water-WISER student
We, therefore, know that WASH is a complex topic, and covers a wide range of services. One of the things that the WATER-Wiser programme is interested in is understanding how we design these spaces. Water and Sanitation are inherently gendered, as previously mentioned, so understanding how people use WASH spaces is necessary to design them. However, as well as the physical and biological needs of those using facilities, we need to consider the external, often political factors which tie into the implementation of building such spaces. The need for them, and the design information for ‘gender inclusive’ and ‘female friendly’ WASH spaces exist freely, yet we see countless instances of spaces poorly designed to function.
One such instance being in the design of menstrual health facilities; we know that menstruators need disposal options, but often there are no disposal options available, as evident by reports of menstruators throwing used items down toilets and into rivers. These behaviours may be due to a lack of knowledge caused by the taboo nature of the topic, but more commonly due to inappropriate facilities that don’t allow menstruators to manage their menstruation as they would choose. Therefore there is often a disjoint between practices due to the configuration of WASH facilities, knowledge, and ideal choice of management.
Menstruation is one aspect that needs to be accounted for when designing gender inclusive spaces, but only by integrating all needs of WASH spaces can we understand what attributes of a space lead to higher levels of quality of life, how inherent patriarchal attitudes effect the prioritisation of gender friendly spaces, how we can make sure what may be classed as add on becomes essential in design to create safe and suitable spaces. By understanding and asking questions, we can hope to work out how to design and ensure the implementation of features of WASH spaces that will improve usability and accessibility for all genders.
Georgia Hales, 1st Year Water-WISER student
As well as female-friendly WASH spaces and appropriate disposal methods, a menstruator requires suitable menstrual hygiene management (MHM) materials, supplies, education and information, especially during the time leading up to menarche. Limited access to these four components of an effective MHM service is exacerbated in certain contexts such as in emergencies. Women and girls face even greater barriers to carrying out proper MHM given the lack of privacy and safety often accompanying life in a humanitarian context and the transient nature of displacement.
Due to its stigma, which lends it to be shrouded in silence, MHM interventions usually come as an afterthought in humanitarian responses. Furthermore, since MHM falls into a number of different sectors (WASH, protection, health, education, shelter, etc.) it requires a multi-sectoral approach, and can consequently suffer issues of coordination and accountability. More often than not, men, who are less likely to be aware of the importance of proper MHM services, make up the majority of camp coordination teams. Not only does this highlight a need for women to be enabled to make decisions in these contexts, but also for men to be sensitised to this issue.
Although WASH does have a unique place in everyone’s lives, it has deep roots in the development sector. A sector needs to move away from neo-colonial, engineering and infrastructure led approaches, enabled by globalisation, and more towards a user-based, holistic viewpoint in which social and contextual factors are the basis of action. To fully comprehend the wants and needs of a given community, it is imperative to listen to their voices and the voices of those who may tend to be less heard: those of women and girls.
Granted, giving those voices a platform is not straightforward, the implications of which should be considered on a number of levels. The individual woman may not want to share her voice as she has too many other responsibilities (women tend to be the main caregivers on top of their paid work). The woman in the household may run into conflict with her husband if she is seen discussing with strangers, and the woman as part of the community may be ostracised if she is speaking freely about taboo topics such as menstruation. Therefore, each approach to tackling gender-related WASH issues should be carried out in a contextualised and sensitive manner.