Gender equity is key to boosting water access and food security.
Kenya’s “Vision 2030” to become a middle-income country depends on women’s equal participation in development.
Performance-based contracts provide incentives for Water Ministry staff to address gender inequity in their work.
April 21, 2010 –The rolling hills of Kenya’s arid Kajiado Central District are tinged with green, the gift of recent rains, but last year’s prolonged drought still weighs heavy on many minds.
Magdeline Mvrunya, a member of the semi-Nomadic Maasai tribe, says she spent much of her day collecting water from the closest well, while her husband herded cattle as far away as the Tanzanian border in search of pastures.
“It not that the well was so far away,” Mvrunya, 55, says, speaking softly in the darkness of her mud-walled home. “The problem was that during the drought I had to wait two hours for the water to rise. Then, the animals had to drink before I could get water.”
Mvrunya is among more than 15 million people in water-scarce Kenya on the fringe of water services, dependent on sometimes distant wells, ponds, trucked-in water or rainfall for farming or personal use.
During the drought, women and girls—the traditional water-collectors and frequently the food producers—travelled 5 km or more on foot to look for water. Many were forced to quit or curtail side businesses or even stop going to school to meet the family's needs as water grew increasingly scarce, and men brought home the dying cattle for women to hand-feed.
As the drought finally eased in March, Ministry of Water and Irrigation personnel best positioned to help ease the water-collection burden on women gathered in Karen, near Nairobi. They were at a special training session organized by the Ministry of Water and Irrigation in collaboration with the $150 million Water and Sanitation Service Improvement Project, financed by the International Development Association (IDA), and with a financial contribution from the World Bank’s Gender Action Plan.
Most were newly appointed gender focal points charged with supporting the Kenya’s ambitious Vision 2030 plan to become a middle-income country.
Increasingly, in the government and among Kenya’s development partners, it’s understood that Vision 2030’s goals, including food security, improved water, sanitation and social services for all, can’t be achieved unless women take equal part in the development process.
“We need to address gender to meet the Millennium Development Goals and Vision 2030,” Wangari Mwai, a professor at Kenyatta University, told 35 gender officers from eight regions on March 23.
“We need to understand and address gender biases … Projects cannot work without changing the mindset.”
Plan to Bring Water Closer
While 83% of people in Kenya’s urban areas have access to clean water – water protected from contamination such as fecal matter – only 51% of people in rural areas have the same access. And only 12% of people in rural areas have water house connections. About 30% of the population has access to improved sanitation, defined as a facility that hygienically separates human excreta from human contact, according to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply and Sanitation.
The woman is the breadwinner—she’s the person who feeds the family—so if we don’t have her participating, learning how to plant and harvest on the farms at the district level, empowering her to make independent farming decisions, then irrigation will not be so sustainable.
-Dorcas Otieno, Irrigation and Drainage Department, Nairobi, Kenya
During the drought, government officials drilled wells, trucked water to people in arid and semi-arid areas, and installed water tanks in strategic places for people and animals, says Theresa Wasike, Gender Desk Officer of the Ministry of Water and Irrigation.
But the 2030 plan demands more infrastructure, such as dams, pipelines, and irrigation systems, be built to bring water closer to people, she says.
“When you're talking about water you have to take into consideration the distance that women travel to get water and how you can help them access quality water so that they can continue being productive. If we could bring water projects close to them they might spend time doing other projects, activities, and children, particularly girls, would not drop out of school to assist in water collection.”
And as young men increasingly move from rural to urban areas, it’s becoming more important to empower women in agricultural communities, says Dorcas Otieno, an officer working in the budgeting and planning section of the Irrigation and Drainage Department in Nairobi and a participant at the gender workshop.
“When we go monitoring, we find that in the groups, there are so many men at the management and decision making level. The women will come but they will be on the back stage, they don’t feel they have any role to play,” she says.
“Now, as an officer working in the budgeting office, I have to lobby my director and chief finance officer that we be given more money for training and sensitization of women. Agriculture is the backbone of our country’s development. The woman is the breadwinner—she’s the person who feeds the family—so if we don’t have her participating, learning how to plant and harvest on the farms at the district level, empowering her to make independent farming decisions, then irrigation will not be so sustainable. We have to involve her and empower her according to MDG goal number 3.”
Gender Mainstreaming in Water Sector
Aiding the effort are performance-based contracts—instituted by the Water and Irrigation Ministry in 2009—that provide incentives and penalties for ministry staff related to their performance on addressing gender inequity in their work.
“It's a really good practice, because suddenly officials are responsible for paying attention to gender issues and it's in their job, and they will be evaluated against it,” says Rosemary Rop, a water and sanitation specialist with the Water and Sanitation Program, a trust-funded program at the World Bank.
The goal is “gender mainstreaming” of the water sector, a concept supported by the World Bank Group’s Gender Action Plan and at various stages in several African countries. The idea is to accelerate the integration of gender concerns in economic sectors such as infrastructure, and as a result address the root causes of poverty and gender inequality.
Nairobi-based World Bank Senior Gender Specialist Asa Torkelsson, one of the organizers of the gender training in Karen, says that Kenya’s performance-based contracts have had a “catalytic effect” on efforts to mainstream gender in the water sector.
“To judge from the evidence now, we still have the huge gender gaps, but I can see there are so many amazing things going on, and so many energies invested here. I don't think a couple of years back you would have found gender activists in the water sector to be senior managers. And men. Everybody is keen on making things happen.”
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