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WELL FACTSHEET 

Gender and Poverty

Author: Deirdre Casella, June 2004

Quality Assurance:  Sandy Cairncross, Christine Sijbesma

Abstract

Gender inequality and poverty exclude large numbers of people from enjoying the benefits of water supply and sanitation facilities and processes aimed at their improvement. Fortunately, much is now known about the rationale, methods and impacts, of applying gender and poverty perspectives in the water and sanitation sector.

Introduction

The world's population consists roughly of 50% women and girls and 50% men and boys. Approximately 1.25 billion of them live in poverty, lacking some of the most basic needs for a decent life: safe water to drink, enough water for hygiene and domestic production, and safe places to dispose human and other wastes. One sixth of the world's population, or 1.1 billion people, currently have no access to an improved water supply and 40% lack access to even the simplest sanitation (http://www.wsscc.org).

Of the 1.25 billion people living in poverty, 70% are women. Many of these are single female heads of households.

Poverty and gender interrelate in other ways; women have lower rates of access to and control over resources [e.g. water, land, information, training, income and credit] and weaker influence on planning and management of local development processes than men. Poor women are also over-represented in low-paid jobs.

Poor people have lower capacity to pay for water, sanitation and hygiene products and services, and lack time for unpaid work and meetings.

There is also a tendency for men to retain an increasing share of the household income for their personal use when household poverty increases (http://www.ids.ac.uk/bridge/reports/web-w2-femofpov.doc).

 Box 1: Some definitions

Poor men may also be disadvantaged, e.g. lack of recognition of their roles in service provision in low-income urban areas (http://www.worldbank.org/html/fpd/water/topics/ind_providers.html)

 Poverty and gender are thus key and related variables in the achievement of more equitable access to water and sanitation and better hygiene.

Relevance

Gender and poverty perspectives are not only relevant for achieving more equitable access. They also play important roles in planning and establishing more sustainable and effectively used services and in giving the poor better access to, and influence on development:

·  Participation of men and women in planning and management of new water and sanitation systems is crucial for maintenance and use. It brings new status, skills and jobs that have many social and economic benefits (http://www.ids.ac.uk/bridge/Reports/R11%20Prac%20Strat%20Water%20San%202c.doc)

·  Many best-practice cases in which the urban poor run their own water supply and sanitation services reflect gender perspectives in initiation, operations and management.

(http://www.bestpractices.org/cgi-bin/bp98.cgi?cmd=searchresults&key=EIAtyrkbfah&a=w )

·  Better hygiene and sanitation practices are gender-specific. Men decide on major investments and they do not attach the same importance to sanitation and hygiene as women. Men and boys are also not target groups in hygiene education. Women and girls can seldom change the practices of men, although the latter tend to be less hygienic and are the main non-users of latrines. Gender relations have also kept young women from better hygiene practices which mothers-in-law or husbands see as unnecessary and uneconomic.

(http://www.unicef.org/programme/wes/pubs/behav/behav.htm 

Box 2: Gender Mainstreaming

·  Women and men both use water and waste productively: Watering animals, making bricks, growing vegetables,   fruit, timber and fuel, processing crops and producing beverages for home consumption and sale[1]. For poor households, such productive uses are a crucial supplement to their income. Designing a project for multipurpose use has many benefits.        (http://www.irc.nl/content/view/full/8760G)

·  Gathering water is time and energy consuming, and gender biased (Figure 1). Women and children (represented as ‘other’ in Fig.1) invest more time and effort to carry more water over longer distances for household consumption. Time and energy savings for women and children can have many benefits: For formal and non-formal education, child care, domestic hygiene, community development work, production, improved health status, and increased rest-time. 

Figure 1: Gender differences in time spending and volume of water collected per kilometre per year in 3 African countries. (Malmberg-Calvo 1994)

The Evidence

A wide body of qualitative evidence showing that gender- and poverty-specific approaches are crucial in ensuring that all people get access to, and use, water supply, sanitation and hygiene services has been available for some time[2]. Increasingly, quantitative evidence is emerging that supports these findings.

 Water Supply

Data from a global study of 88 community managed water supplies in 15 countries[3] have made clear the significant associations between a gender- and poverty-sensitive approach and sustainability of water supply services. The study found that projects that had used more gender- and poverty-sensitive demand-responsive approaches had resulted in better sustained services, technically (reliable supply), environmentally (source protection), financially (degree of coverage of recurrent costs), socially (% with access and access for the poor) and institutionally (continuity and quality of local management). These communities also used their services more effectively, i.e., the majority used the improved water supply in a health-promoting manner.

The findings showed that giving choices to more community groups - the poor, better off, women and men - and letting them influence (or control) the process of service establishment empowers them to later manage and sustain their services more effectively.

Key Research Findings:

þ      Better sustained services are more effectively used by the majority of community members in a health-promoting manner.

þ      Better sustained services are significantly associated with a better gender- and poverty-sensitivity in demand-responsive projects, user influence and control over project implementation, sharing of burdens and benefits during operations, and user satisfaction

þ      Services are better sustained when projects offer informed choices to both women and men, both poor and better off, thus empowering them to influence the process of service establishment.

þ      Services are better sustained when both women and men, poor and better off, participate in the management of the service.

þ      Agency policies and objectives influence results on the ground.

þ      Agency staffing patterns, skills, and teamwork are more significantly associated with service outcomes than agency policies.

 These findings were reconfirmed in a study in 2002, involving 63 communities in Flores, the Philippines, randomly stratified from a total of 260 villages with community-managed water supplies[4].

Sanitation

Gender perspectives on sanitation are somewhat less well established. However, the urgency of addressing the challenge for improved sanitation coverage highlighted by studies linking improved household and community sanitation facilities with:

·        higher rates of school enrolment and attendance by girls

·        greater safety for women who no longer need to wait for dark, or travel to distant agricultural fields, to relieve themselves

·        reduced incidence of disease and worm infection among children, in turn decreasing problems such as stunting, learning difficulties, etc.

Box 3: Gender Balance in peri-urban Tanzania

It is now widely known that in household and community sanitation activities and services women and men have different, socially defined, needs, roles and responsibilities. Examples of initiatives that take into account these differences provide evidence of the greater sustainability and effectiveness that result from such perspectives.

One such example is the Wotawati Village experience in Indonesia. Over the course of a four year, Plan International-supported Programme for Family and Child Prosperity in which assistance to households consisted among other things of ‘healthy homes’ hygiene packages and materials and technical support for latrine construction. According to households’ self-classification results, the proportion of poor households in the community decreased by 30% over the period of the Programme.

Table 1: Wotawati Community Self-classification into socio-economic categories, 2000 and 2003

Sari & Parmitha, 2004

However, of possibly greater interest are the post-programme results. Self-initiated efforts of the community led to the achievement of 100% latrine coverage and 100% latrine use after the externally-supported programme ended in 2002. The efforts were based on the initial poverty mapping results which were used by the community to chart disparate access to and use of latrines. Based upon the map  information, disaggre-gated by gender and welfare levels, community members decided how the revolving fund would to be used to increase coverage and the rate of usage to 100% across all socio-economic groups.

Hygiene

"Hard" evidence (i.e. data from surveys or quantified participatory methods) of programmes explicitly impacting upon gender inequality through hygiene promotion is rarer than for water supply and sanitation interventions. However, interesting results have come from a number of hygiene promotion activities in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

One multi-country study (see Box 4) highlights how levels of education impact upon whether certain groups are included or not in hygiene promotion programmes.

The findings emphasise the importance of specific, tailored hygiene promotion programmes for reaching groups excluded from development processes, such as illiterate women and men, and out-of-school children. Such exclusion is often not only due to lack of access to formal education, but also to other factors, such as income, caste, ethnicity, age, a household or community’s remoteness and/or physical and mental disability. It is thus essential to raise awareness that context-specific differences exist and to develop ways to include marginalized groups if the full benefits of improved hygiene are to be enjoyed.

 Box 4: Gender Equity and Inclusion

Box 5: Health "Tax" on the Poor

The importance of addressing the needs and interests of all stakeholders is further demonstrated by a hygiene promotion project, PIACT, in Mexico. Researchers found that initial assumptions about the division of tasks were based on gender stereotypes in which women were overly represented conducting household and family hygiene tasks. More representative images of gender roles, in which men were also depicted conducting hygiene tasks, were selected and validated by the men and women. This resulted in the development of more contextually appropriate promotion materials that both men and women found useful and informative for promoting better hygiene behaviour.

Emerging Lessons

Lessons from the water and sanitation sector have shown that efforts to address gender and poverty face constraints. The lessons also show that these can be overcome:

·  It is still rare to disaggregate data systematically by sex and poverty in the collection, analysis and reporting of information. When done, differences in participation, results and impacts emerge. (www.oecd.org/dataoecd/2/45/1896488.pdf) 

    ( www.ausaid.gov.au/publications/pdf/gender_guidelines_water.pdf )

·  The poor and particularly women face practical and strategic constraints to participation in water and sanitation projects. Agencies can adjust to such constraints (http://www.irc.nl/ content/view /full/4395/) and thereby improve results ( www.ppiaf.org/conference/section1-paper7.pdf )

·  Water services that are more demand-responsive and sensitive to gender and poverty are significantly better sustained and used (http://www.wsp.org/08_Category_output.asp?Category=Participation%2FGender%2FPROWWESS)   ( http://www.wsp.org/pdfs/mpa%202003.pdf )

·  Sanitation programmes often do not reach the poor. High subsidies do not reach the poor and can limit programme size and replication. Yet it is possible to reach the poor in large-scale programmes. (http://www.id21.org/urban/Insights45art2.html)  (http://www,irc.nl/redir/content/download/2575/26699/file/pr4e.pdf )

Conclusion

Poverty- and gender-sensitive approaches are key, and related, variables in the achievement of more equitable access to water and sanitation and better hygiene.

 Project and research results are providing increasing evidence that attention to diversity, through gender- and poverty-sensitive approaches, improves overall impact and effectiveness of sector programming. 

References

Bamberger, M. et al., Influential Evaluations: Evaluations that improved performance and impacts of development programs. World Bank, 2004

Bolt, E. and Cairncross, S., Sustainability of hygiene behaviour and the effectiveness of change interventions. Booklet 2: Findings from a multi-country research study and implications for water and sanitation programmes IRC, International Water and Sanitation Centre, 20004. http://www.irc.nl/page/15266 

Chaggu, E. and E. John, Ecological Sanitation Toilets in Tanzania, 3rd International Conference on Integrated Environmental Management in Southern Africa, Johannesburg, 2002. http://www.gtz.de/ecosan/download/CESMA2002-chaggu.pdf 

Fong, M. et al, Toolkit on Gender in Water and Sanitation. Series No.2, Gender Analysis and Policy, Poverty and Social Policy Department, UNDP-World Bank WSP, Washington, D.C., 1996. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDS_lBank_Servlet?pcont=details&eid=000094946_00121301483084 

Gender and Water Alliance. The Gender and Water Development Report 2003: Gender Perspectives on Policies in the Water Sector. WEDC, UK. www.genderandwateralliance.org/english/annual.asp 

Gross, B., van Wijk, C. and Mukherjee, N.,  Linking Sustainability with Demand, Gender and Poverty: A study in community managed water supply projects in 15 countries. UNDP-World Bank WSP, Washington D.C. and IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, NL, 2001. http://www.wsp.org/publications/global_plareport.pdf 

Khan, A.H.,The sanitation gap: Development's deadly menace, UNICEF, 1997.

Mailmberg-Calvo, C., The Role of Women in Rural Transport: Access of Women to Domestic Facilities. SSTP Working Paper No. 11. World Bank and ECA, 1994. 

http://www.worldbank.org/afri/gender/ghps61101_en.pdf

Narayan, D., The Contribution of People's Participation: Evidence from 121 Rural Water Supply Projects. The World Bank, Washington, D.C., July, 1995.

http://www-wds.worldbank.org/ servlet/WDS_IBank_Servlet?pcont=details&eid=000009265_3961219095253

PIACT. 'Mexico: Fathers and children'. Salubritas, vol. 6, no. 2, 1982. 

http://www.genderandwater alliance.org/english/arc_casestudies.asp   

Sari, K. and Paramitha, P., Participatory Monitoring of Sanitation: The Case of Wotawati Hamlet, Pucung, Indonesia. IRC, International Water and Sanitation Centre, 2005. http://www. irc.nl/page/7902   

Simpson-Hebert M., R. Sawyer and L. Clarke, Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation: A new approach to working with communities. WHO, Switzerland, Geneva, 2000. http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/hygiene/envsan/en/EOS96-11a.pdf

Van der Voorden, C. and K. Eales, Mainstreaming gender in South African sanitation programmes: A blind spot or common practice? The Mvula Trust, South Africa, 2002.

http://www.genderandwateralliance.org/reports/s%20africa%20case%20study.doc

Wijk-Sijbesma, C.A. van, The best of two worlds?: Methodology for participatory assessment of community water services. TP 38, IRC - International Water and Sanitation Centre,  NL, 2001.

Wijk-Sijbesma, C.A. van,  Gender in water resources management, water supply and sanitation: roles and realities revisited.  TP33-E, IRC, International Water and Sanitation Centre,  NL, 1998.

[1] van Wijk, 1998

[2] e.g. van Wijk, 1998, 2001

[3] Gross et al., 2001

[4] M. Bamberger et al., 2004

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