Good evening, everyone,
and thank you so much for joining us today for our seminar on balancing social and environmental capital for sustainable development in Africa,
co-hosted by the Africa Oxford Initiative and the African House at Christchurch.
Well, the challenge refers to the paradox of sort of balancing universal access to goods and services also for the last mile with Universal,
while with this was the financial sustainability of actually delivering them.
And we'll hear a bit more about this today.
If launched this African House initiative at Christchurch earlier this year, and partly with a view to create a space for collaboration for knowledge,
exchange and partnerships with fellow, well, fellows and researchers from Africa.
So we are absolutely delighted to have the opportunity today to host three hour fox visiting fellows from West, Central and East Africa to.
And we'll be hearing or discussions around sort of inclusive water service delivery in water stressed
environments and about how decisions are made and very complex social and ecological systems,
and also how conflict interferes with the basic provision of services and the
development of rural public policies to advance the sustainable development agenda.
And I'd like to hand over to our first speaker, Professor Sarilumab Katchi.
She's an associate professor at the Institute of Anthropology,
Gender and African Studies at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, and during her stay here at Oxford.
She's based with us in the research programme on Water Security at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment,
and her research interests include sort of understanding local contexts,
social and behavioural aspects of development, gender issues and community engagement.
And today, she'll be reflecting on some of the ethnographic research in Khatri county, Kenya, on gender and access and leveraging on social capital.
Over to you, Sutherland. Good evening. I'm going to tell you the story about a study that we are doing in Katwe in Kenya,
Kiwis and ASL Semi-Arid and arid land, which is more of a rural area that has aspects of water issues.
Given the fact that they have experienced drought for almost almost seven or eight months is dry season,
so water becomes quite a key issue in that area. So what I'll be presenting is based on a study that we've been doing together with the research
programme and the School of Geography trying to look at water issues from a socio perspective.
So I'll give preliminary findings in relation to the aspect that deals with gender issues and try and
look at it on how they've been using social capital to try and leverage on inclusive access of the water.
The pictures you see there are part of the water sources that the community have to deal with.
And I'll also just show you some other aspects of the water sources that they engage in just
to help us get a context in which the community is trying to work with aspects of what access.
So what we have, whether animals are drinking from that's what we call an at the dump, and the dams are kind of places that are dug in the US.
And then when rain comes, water collects, then the community is able to use that water for some duration.
The one on the on your right is also an up dump,
but it's more of a private dump where a family can decide to dig one of those pits in their homes and use it to preserve water.
They trap the rainwater, and they use it over some duration before it dries up.
The other source is what we call the protected shallow wells, and this a kind of wealth that had dug quite deep,
and the community would either cement around it and have a small hole where they can fetch water using rope.
And kind of containers, which they point to the ground and drew the water up from the same, the one on your right is also shallow well.
But the kind of protection that each of the shallow wells have a different based on
the group that is walking or the individuals that are walking in that kind of well,
then we have the more improved sources, which are the piped water sources.
And this the community's able to access water from the taps using various mechanisms.
The one on the left is one of the rich kind of improved boreholes, which also has automated system of water connexion.
The other one on the right is a normal water system.
What we call them kiosks, a small shop where you go and somebody will open up and sell the water once they're available.
So the question I'd like to ask if you go back to the different water sources that you see is which one would
you choose to draw your water from and why would you choose to draw your water from either of those sources?
And those are situations which the communities have to deal with each and every day in terms of deciding making decisions on where do we access water?
And there are several social factors that are taking social and economic factors that are
taken into consideration when they have to decide between where to collect the water from.
And so those social and cultural factors, economic factors are some of the things that we trying to establish in our study,
and we realised that water also has its aspects in relation to gender issues, water issues.
There are various factors that play in in the water water space.
And one of the things we know is that women play a very key role,
especially women and girls really carry a big burden in terms of water collection for household use.
And we can see pictures of a woman collecting water from an open well,
this is a shallow well that is dug in a riverbed when the rains have gone and the river dries up,
they dig a hole in the riverbed and they're able to access water.
And children also are a key component in helping the households to access water.
And so you find young boys and girls also accompanying their mothers or even going individually to collect water from those those water sources.
The other players are also men. Men are also a key player in terms of water collection.
But as you can see, their water collection is different on a different from how the women access water, the men, the access water,
and they are able to transport them using either a hand cart or a donkey driven cut,
or they have bicycles to help them take the water to their sources.
On the other hand, women of the use either donkeys or they carry the water on their backs.
So again, we find the gender dimensions, the gender differences coming out in terms of the collection of water and how it's transported to the home.
And one of the things that we also need to note when we go back to the slide on the men men many times from our study,
what we are finding is that the water they collect is mainly used for either construction or they are using it for their vendors.
They sell the water in the towns. But the women, when you find the women collecting the water, most of the water,
the majority of the water that they carry is usually for the domestic use.
And we know that water for domestic use is something we need every day.
So that just shows how busy the women are in terms of collecting water.
Because how much water can they collect in a day if these are the sources of water transportation and also just the water sources, the use?
So how much of that can they carry in a day?
So that means it's a very repetitive activity that requires a lot of their time, and so a lot of their time is engaged in this kind of processes.
But besides the aspect of the different gender variations in terms of what collection and the
way they transport the water and the water usage is also at home has a lot of gender variations.
The context in which this is happening is a context, which is a dry area.
And so you find that when whenever the when the dry season setting the water sources that the communities depend on,
which are Kloza dry up unless they're using the piped boreholes, which they have to pay for.
And many times they prefer to go farther because the decisions they have to make is also economic decisions.
In terms of can I go further and get the water for free or can I do I have the money to be able to access it closer but have to pay a cost on it?
And so many times they have to walk quite some distances to be able to access the water.
And as the drought sets in, they even need to start leaving their homes as early as three or four a.m. to be able to reach the water sources on time.
And they may end up staying even in those water sources for maybe two or three hours.
Because what happens in this water sources is the more you draw the water, the lower the water table goes.
So sometimes you have to wait for the water table to come up again for you to be able to get enough water to draw.
So those are some of the challenges that the communities are facing when it comes to issues of the decisions
they have to make and the distances they have to cover when drought sets in or the dry season sets in.
And of course, this then impacts on the time that it takes to be able to go collect the water.
And as we notice, the women are the ones who are doing more of the daily water collection because of the needs, the household domestic needs.
And so that means they are spending a lot of time going to collect the water.
Time that would have been spent on something more productive is sent on just trying to get access to water.
So that then also reduces the time that they can spend on other income generating activities.
And so the aspect of the inequalities in terms of the gender inequalities keep increasing
based on such kind of issues during the drought season because of the water shortages.
They are also limited choices of where to fetch water.
So again, another decision that you have to play around with is Do I fetch water from where I can get it and the what I save?
Or do I go far and get it where it's cheap, but I have to pay for it?
So those are the choices again that they keep grappling with. And of course, even in the dry season, the price of water also goes up.
And so that's a challenge also. And the aspects of hygiene and sanitation,
given that you find people having to fetch water from sources that are not very clean, also coming in related to water quality.
And that links to aspects of health implications.
Because you're dealing with water that is not safe, you don't have the means to be able to purify that water before you consume it.
So some of the things we found was also communities talking about waterborne diseases being a common thing in the area.
And one of the things we also came across was the aspect of his ethnicity, the community we studied.
What an area where the pastoral communities.
So when the drought sets in, the pastoral communities move from there the areas and come to now access water amongst the community we were studying.
And this has aspects of also conflict comes in because the pastoral communities come in with a lot of
livestock which need watering and the the community we started is trying to get water for domestic use.
So just the Guindos conflict between water for domestic use and water for agricultural use.
So when we look at this aspect and trying to link it to aspects of gender inequalities in water access,
we know that aspects of SDGs, we have the statistics that is trying to increase access to water to all.
But we are finding that there are still aspects that need to be taken into consideration
to help meet that gender gap of increasing access to people to safe and clean water.
And one of the things that we see that we find in the communities that there have been different
institutions that have come up to try and deal with the water challenges in the community.
So for the women that leveraging a lot on the social capital amongst themselves, trying to help each other when?
There's a woman who cannot go far to collect water, either woman who's expectant or who has a new a newborn baby,
she leverages on her social capital or networks with the other women who will go and collect water on her behalf and bring forward the water.
Some women have also got into groups where they have this shallow wells and where now they're able to access water from those kind of water sources.
So what we see is that in terms of improving water access and trying to reduce on the gender inequalities that exist in water,
the water space there is need to work with existing communities and existing institutions.
We have the formal institutions that are government based that are trying to provide water, but on their own, they're not able to provide the water.
So it's important that we work together with the existing communities on the ground,
see how they can leverage on what is existing in the community and strengthen
those as they try to improve on reducing the gender inequalities in water access,
not just as an aspect of provision, but also aspects of water governance.
Having women also to help in terms of just managing the water sources that exists in the community.
So thank you. That's the end of my presentation.