Water is one of the most essential elements of life, particularly human life. Safe, clean, accessible sources of water for all is a key goal of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Millennium Development Goal aiming to reduce the number of people without access worldwide by 50% was one of the few met. Unfortunately, there are still many people worldwide without ready access to a safe and clean source of water and the burden of collecting water in most places falls to women.
In the Western world, we expect to be able to turn on our taps and for clean water to come running out for us to drink, brush our teeth with, cook with and wash ourselves and our clothes in. This is made possible, in Australia anyway, by a vast network of infrastructure including water treatment facilities, pipework (big pipes, little pipes and pipes in houses), chemical dosing facilities (chlorine in various keeps the bugs from growing in the water in the pipelines) and a different set of pipes to take away the water for treatment as sewerage. The quality of this product is regulated by legislation and there are many people who work to both produce good quality drinking water and to maintain the infrastructure to make it possible for it to get to us.
A lack of water infrastructure leads to increased work for women providing them with less time to make money for their families or to go to school depending on how old they are. Because we live in a world where boy children are overwhelmingly prioritised over girl children and men are expected to work and women to look after the home, where there is a need for water to be gathered this task falls to the ‘lesser’. The girl child who can spend hours every day walking to the nearest river does not have time or energy to go to school. The woman who can spend hours walking to the nearest well does not have time or energy to raise income to support her family. On average, women and girls can walk between 6 and 10km a day just collecting water. In my house, we use an average of 220 L of water a day between two of us and for Australians we use relatively little water. Most water buckets hold about 20L of water, which at 20kg is pretty heavy anyway. Can you imagine doing enough trips to a river or well carrying 20kg just to get the amount of waste I use daily?
When collecting water from a river or other natural water source, it is often contaminated and highly unlikely to meet the stringent legislation our water is subjected to. This results in high levels of infant mortality and general illness due to diahorreoa from many things including cholera, courtesy of Vibrio cholerae a type of bacteria that loves dirty water. The burden of caring for sick members of the family also falls unfairly on the shoulders of women further impacting their ability to gain an education and earn money for their families. In some parts of the world, like Bangladesh, the natural water sources are contaminated with arsenic making them totally unusable or people are poisoned. And sometimes water infrastructure in the developing world fails. In Michigan in the USA there is a town that has no water because the local source, due to bad management of industry in the area and lack of control of the pipes from rusting, has been contaminated with lead. This is having major impacts on the local population’s health. If this sort of thing is possible in the USA where they have some of the strongest legislation on water quality in the world and possibly the leading organisation to understand and control rust of infrastructure, what hope do places without this have?
There are things we can do about this. Start by checking out WaterAid and Care who both have fundraisers in March to raise awareness and funds to help bring clean water to all and increase the rights and futures of women and girls in the process. Both of them have great websites where I got most of my facts from. Join in on Walk in her shoes or Walk4Water or pledge to only drink water for the month or sponsor someone else you know participating.
Image: This is me in a water filter trying to work out why it wasn’t performing as well as it should have been. We are lucky to have the infrastructure to produce high quality drinking water here in Australia and we maintain it.
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