Why Water Rights Are Women's Rights

By Yifat Susskind, AlterNet. Posted August 5, 2008.

Having an ample supply of safe water is something most of us don't think much about. Turning on the kitchen tap or running a bath is usually an effortless decision. Yet, when we flush the toilet, we use as much water as most people in Kenya use in an entire day.

Imagine that day. You spend six hours fetching and hauling heavy loads of water across a dangerous expanse. Once you get the water home, you conserve and manage every drop to have enough for drinking, cooking, cleaning, bathing the kids, and watering the vegetable garden that keeps your family from going hungry. Since the water is untreated, you never know what kind of microbes or pollution you and your family are drinking.

For many rural women, that imaginary day is every day. For others who live in cities, water is just as scarce and unsafe because of economic policies that reward pollution and price clean water out of reach. In total, 17 percent of the world's people lack access to safe water. This is a human rights abuse of staggering proportion -- threatening more than a billion people and undermining a range of other human rights, including rights to health, environmental sustainability, economic justice and peace.

Around the world, it is women and girls who are responsible for providing water to households. That division of labor makes water a critical women's human rights concern.

Water and Health

Every year, nearly 1.8 million people (90 percent of them children under five) die from diarrhea caused by dirty water. Typhoid, cholera, and other deadly diseases are also spread by contaminated water, bringing the death toll from water related diseases to a staggering 3.5 million people a year. In fact, unsafe drinking water is the source of 80 percent of disease worldwide and kills more children every year than wars, malaria and HIV/AIDS combined.

Without clean water, it's nearly impossible for people to maintain good hygiene for themselves and their children. Lack of personal hygiene contributes to the spread of infectious diseases and compromises people's dignity and confidence. Whether or not a community chronically lacks water, no mother wants to send her child to school with a dirty face.

The daily task of carrying water over distances is back-breaking work for women. In rural Africa, women commonly walk 10 kilometers a day to a water source and back -- and twice that distance in the dry season. Often, women carry loads of up to 50 lbs on the head, hip, or back. Over time, the strain can deform the spine and pelvis, causing extreme pain and disability. A more immediate worry for many women and girls is the threat of sexual attack as they venture far from home in search of water.

In the rural village of Umoja, Kenya, an 11-year-old girl is pregnant as a result of a rape that occurred while she was fetching water. The girl and her baby will be cared for by the women of Umoja, but in many communities, rape survivors are cast out and their children are permanently ostracized.

Tremendous health benefits are achieved when people gain access to even small quantities of clean water. Simple measures, like washing hands with soap and water, reduce the spread of deadly diarrhoeal diseases by more than 35 percent. Ensuring clean water for washing can also prevent trachoma, a leading cause of blindness.

The UN Millennium Development Goals call for reducing by half the number of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. Achieving this target would mean more than 200,000 fewer child deaths in 2015 and more than one million children's lives saved over the following decade. Across the world, children would gain another 272 million days of school, thanks to fewer episodes of diarrhea. And economic benefits of about $38 billion would accrue to some of the poorest countries. Financing these gains would cost about $10 billion -- less than half of what rich countries spend each year on mineral water.

Water and Environmental Sustainability

Today, many women find that they must walk farther to fetch water as it becomes increasingly scarce. Only about 2.5 percent of the Earth's water is fresh and suitable for drinking. Climate change, pollution, and the unsustainable use of water for industry and factory farming are depleting this limited supply. In Peru, nearly all drinking water comes from glaciers that are melting fast and may be completely gone by 2015. Across Africa, all 667 major lakes are drying up. Lake Chad, once the third-largest lake in Africa, has shrunk by 90 percent, mainly because its waters have been diverted into canals. In Indonesia and Brazil, timber and biofuel plantations are monopolizing and depleting water sources. Around the world, industrial agriculture is contaminating groundwater with toxic pesticides.

These are serious problems, but they have clear solutions, including reclamation of polluted water, water conservation, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and government investment in water infrastructure. Where these measures have been implemented, they have worked well. The US Clean Water Act, for example, detoxified more than half of the country's polluted rivers and lakes (before the law was gutted by the Bush Administration). Organic farming is proving to be a reliable way to feed people and protect the planet. The problem is not that we lack solutions, but that we haven't yet achieved the political momentum to guarantee that our solutions are implemented.

See more stories tagged with: health, water, water scarcity

Yifat Susskind is the Communications Director of MADRE, an international women's human rights organization that partners with women's community-based organizations around the world.

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