©UN-HABITAT Women in Nepal waiting to collect water.

Poor access to water and sanitation in slums poses great inconveniences and health risk for whole communities, but often with the greatest burden on women and girls.

Some 1.1 billion people worldwide still lack access to safe water and 2.6 billion have no means to proper sanitation.

UN-HABITAT’s Water and Sanitation Programme brings about improvements to whole communities, with work focusing on Africa and Asia.

And perhaps again because their situations were so challenging to start off with, it is also likely that it is women and girls who experience the most dramatic improvements in their lives when good programmes are put in place.

Women and girls are most often responsible for collecting water for the whole family, and they also usually manage household and human waste. As a result, they are more exposed to the health and environmental hazards associated with poor sanitation.

And when there are few or no toilets, many women have no choice but to relieve themselves out in the open, in secluded areas or under the cover of darkness, which makes them more vulnerable to sexual and physical assault.

Women, many of them living in slums themselves, can and do play an important role in role in developing and managing water and sanitation services for better health, convenience, environmental sustainability and income-generating opportunities in urban, informal settlements.

Sustained efforts to recognize and increase these contributions by women will advance progress towards the target within Goal 7 of the Millennium Development Goals on halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation by 2015.

UN-HABITAT’s gender-responsive water and sanitation programmes are bringing about significant benefits to the quality of life of women and their communities. The benefits include greater convenience, less loss of energy from the labour of carrying water, better health and hygiene, more privacy and dignity, more time to engage in work and thus more opportunity to earn money for the family.

©UN-HABITAT The community helps to dig trenches for a water and sanitation project in Laos

Less time spent fetching water can also mean more time to study in school, which further improves prospects for better employment and poverty alleviation.

Communities also benefit from greater safety and security when water and sanitation facilities are well-managed. UN-HABITAT helps communities to help themselves in this regard by promoting schemes run by community groups themselves.

Some of the highlights of gender mainstreaming in UN-HABITAT’s water and sanitation programmes include the following:

• Sanitation and microfinance programmes for women in Asia and Africa. For example, a microcredit water and sanitation project targeting female-headed households has been implemented in ten African towns;

• Capacity-building and gender training for water and sanitation policy and decision-makers, as well as women’s groups, in both the Africa and Asia programmes. This promotes better planning and management around water and sanitation and more equitable outcomes for men and women;

• Mainstreaming of gender issues in water and sanitation tool kits;

• Promotion of women’s participation in the operation and management of community-based water and sanitation schemes (E.g. 33% women’s representation in users’ committee in Nepal and 30% women’s representation in a project in Lao People’s Democratic Republic);

• Partnerships with governments at the national and local levels to build the basis of gender responsive, pro-poor governance through poverty mapping, gender assessment and needs identification;

• Partnering with the Gender and Water Alliance and local governments to develop gender mainstreaming strategies and action plans for cities.

Read more about UN-HABITAT’s Water and Sanitation Programme.

Related links:

Small loans for poor women and vulnerable households for water and sanitation in the Lake Victoria region

Framework for Gender Mainstreaming: Water and Sanitation for Cities
Navigating Gender in African Cities: A Synthesis Report of Rapid Gender and Pro-Poor Assessments in the 17 Cities of the Water for African Cities (WAC) II Programme 

Mainstreaming Gender Water and Sanitation (strategy document for Asia)

Navigating Gender in Development of Water and Sanitation in Urban Areas – A Rapid Gender Assessment of the Cities of Bhopal, Gwalior, Indore and Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh (India)