Gender in Infrastructure

Giving Women Economic Opportunity: World Bank Initiatives

Gender—Water and Women in Kenya

World Bank Photo: Georgina Goodwin

During the drought Magdeline Mvrunya spent much of her day collecting water while her husband herded their cattle to distant pastures.

As drought eases, gender equity is seen key to boosting water access and food security.

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’s not that the well was so far away,” Mvrunya, 55, says, speaking softly in the darkness of her mudwalled 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 watercollection 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 World Bank’s Gender Action Plan.

Most were newly appointed gender focal points charged with supporting 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.

World Bank Photo: Georgina Goodwin

Increasingly, it’s understood that food security, improved water, sanitation and social services for all can’t be achieved unless women take equal part in the development process.

Plan is to Bring Water Closer

While 83 percent of people in Kenya’s urban areas have access to clean water—water protected from contamination such as fecal matter—only 51 percent of people in rural areas have the same access. And only 12 percent of people in rural areas have water house connections. About 30 percent 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.

“But the 2030 plan demands more infrastructure, such as dams, pipelines, and irrigation systems, be built to bring water closer to people”, she says.'

According to Dorcas Otieno, a budgeting and planning officer in the Irrigation and Drainage Department, “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 watercollection.

“As young men increasingly move from rural to urban areas, it’s becoming more important to empower women in agricultural communities.

“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 backstage, they don’t feel they have any role to play,” she says.

“Now, as a budgeting officer, I have to lobby my director and chief finance officer to be given more money for training for 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.”

Goal is 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—it’s in their job descriptionandtheywillbeevaluatedagainstit,”saysRosemary 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 (economic empowerment of women is more the central concept of the GAP). 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 huge gender gaps, but I can see there are so many amazing things going on, and so much energy invested here. I don’t think a couple of years back you would have found gender activists in the water sector at the senior management level. And men! Everybody is keen on making things happen.”

View a slide show, "Women and Water in Kenya"

Download the full Gender Action Plan newsletter of May 2010 (PDF 1.9MB)