Environmental Justice, Women’s Activism and Making the Invisible Visible
Like water itself, the roles of women in water-stressed areas — and the work they do in environmental justice — is vital and too often unseen.
Making the Invisible Visible
“Groundwater is invisible, but its impact is visible everywhere.” Earlier this month, in the advent of #WorldWaterDay, UN-Water announced the beginning of their campaign “Groundwater — Making the Invisible Visible.” The campaign, dedicated to promoting groundwater protection and sustainable management, highlights the importance of groundwater despite its invisibility in the modern world.
While the theme focuses on groundwater specifically, it’s a fitting message for water access in general. In areas with regular safe water access, it’s easy to take water access for granted — and it’s hard to imagine what life might be like for someone who doesn’t have that resource. When something as vital as water access is lacking in a community, life becomes worse for the community in countless small and large ways — and it’s often the most vulnerable people in the community who suffer the most.
In particular, women and girls often bear the burden of suffering and extra work when a community lacks safe water access. At H2O4ALL, we celebrate #InternationalWomensDay because water access is a women’s issue. The challenges that women in water-stressed communities face to procure water for their families and the work women do to preserve sustainable water for future generations, too often goes unseen.
In honor of World Water Day and #InternationalWomensDay, let’s work on making the invisible visible.
Why is Water Access A Women’s Issue?
One of the biggest challenges facing women in water-stressed communities is collecting water. When your family lives several kilometres away from the nearest water source, someone will have the job of finding water — and eight times out of ten, that job falls on women and girls.
On average, women in water-stressed areas walk six kilometres a day to find water. However, some may walk dozens of kilometres and spend several hours a day walking. The daily effort to provide water often means spending a massive amount of time and energy finding something that most people take for granted — time that could go toward work, education, or spending time with one’s family.
In particular, young girls who shoulder the task of collecting water for their families may miss out on their education. Girls may get up before dawn in order to collect water before school starts or spend hours after dark collecting water in the afternoon. If the trip is long enough, they may have to drop out of school altogether to keep providing water for their families.
The trip may also be dangerous. It requires women, and often very young girls, to be far away from home for hours at a time. In reports from a CARE International initiative in Mozambique, following the El Nino drought in 2016, women tell stories of older men preying on young girls when they leave the house to find water. This resulted in many young girls winding up pregnant without support.
Thanks to the burden and the dangers posed by the daily trip for water, thousands of young girls will have to give up their education and their best shot for a better future. Without a secondary education, girls are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to die in childbirth, more likely to have children early and see them die before they reach the age of five.
On the other hand, completing secondary education gives girls a chance to make life better for themselves and their families. They are likely to marry and start families later, decreasing their chances of dying in childbirth. Their children tend to be healthier, and they are more likely to complete their secondary education as well — especially their daughters. All of these things become more feasible for young girls when the burden of water insecurity is lifted.
We take steady water access for granted, and it isn’t easy to understand the sheer impact it can have on a person’s life when safe water is missing. If we want to understand the predicament of women in water-stressed areas or support them in creating a better future for their families, we must understand the impact of water on their lives. This is especially true since, in the wake of climate change, the burden of water insecurity could become much worse.
A Growing Problem
In areas where natural water is scarce, climate change may make the burden of collecting water even greater in the future. In Africa, desertification is destroying arable land at an alarmingly fast rate. Temperatures are expected to rise 1.5 times higher than in the rest of the world by the end of the century, leading to less rainfall and more extreme droughts.
As water becomes scarcer and scarcer, women and girls in these areas have to take longer and longer trips to find water. In Kenya near Ntalami, the site of one of H2O4ALL’s safe water initiatives, women speak of spending all day just to find a water source that they can use to provide for their families — and the sources they used to rely on are not always there anymore.
Moreover, drought in water-stressed areas can completely upset the economy of those areas. As droughts become more frequent and more severe, people in dry climates find themselves unable to find water, feed themselves, or take care of their families. They may have to travel long distances to live within walking distance of water, uprooting or separating families and communities. The lack of water can completely destroy a family’s stability — and women tend to suffer the most when this happens.
Reports by UN WomenWatch on water-stressed areas show that girls are less likely to finish school and more likely to marry early during periods of drought. The long walks for water prevent girls from attending school regularly, often leaving them with no choice, and poverty may render families unable to support girls’ education. In addition, child marriages and forced marriages increase as families look for security for their daughters or seek money from dowries.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen the havoc that rising temperatures and extreme weather can wreak on communities. However, the struggles of communities in developing countries, which often lack the infrastructure and support to cope with increasing water shortages, too often goes unseen. As temperatures continue to rise and droughts become more frequent, women from those communities need to be included in the conversation. Like groundwater, the struggles of women in water-stressed communities have been invisible for too long.
Fighting for the Future
With the daily struggles that beset women in water-stressed communities, it’s no wonder that women are often the ones who advocate for climate justice in their communities. In spite of the disadvantages women still face around the world, many women have chosen to challenge their family’s situations and have helped make life better for themselves and their families.
Over the past two decades, women activists in Africa have been at the forefront of the climate fight. The Green Belt Movement, which empowers communities and combats desertification by planting trees in deforested Kenya, was founded by the Nobel Prize Winner Professor Wangari Muta Maathai in response to environmental degradation in rural Kenyan communities. The movement empowered rural communities, especially women, to plant seedlings in watershed areas, restoring degraded water tables to preserve their function. Thanks to their efforts, the movement has planted more than 51 million trees in Kenya.
Not only does the Green Belt Movement restore Kenya’s forests and preserve its watersheds, but it also empowers rural women to take environmental stewardship into their own hands. Planters for the Green Belt Movement receive a small stipend for their work, helping women in struggling rural communities support their families. And the work they do makes them a part of an effort to preserve the future of their communities, despite drastic and seemingly unstoppable changes in the climate. Professor Maathai died in 2011, but her legacy lives on in the Green Belt Movement.
In Uganda, female politicians and activists have played an indispensable role in environmental preservation. The late Honorable Maria Mutagamba was the first Ugandan woman to be elected to the position of Minister of Water and the Environment and an active member of UNICEF Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. She encouraged Ugandan women to enact change at the community level throughout her political career by forming women’s groups and community health clubs.
In 2022, young activists continue the good fight to protect their communities from environmental degradation. Women like Vanessa Nakate of Uganda, the founder of the Rise Up Movement; Kaossara Sani of Togo; and Portia Adu Mensah of Ghana, the founder of the sustainable developmental nonprofit Dream Hunt, are fighting to build a better future for their communities.
However, their voices are often marginalized because of their gender and country of origin. Women activists often report facing opposition as environmental activists and being ignored and left out of the international conversation by male and white environmentalists.
Despite their marginalization in the international community, these women play an indispensable role in combating climate change. If we want to achieve anything like a just and equitable solution to climate change, we need to listen to the voices of the people who stand the most to lose in a future affected by climate change. Water-stressed communities are especially vulnerable in the face of climate change, and the women in those communities may face the most danger in an impending climate crisis. Like water, their work is essential — and it has been taken for granted far too often.
Thanks to Peter Churchill, Vicky Higgins, Salphine Mithika and Timothy Muttoo for providing images.
