Richel Langit-Dursin
Sara Ahmed, chair of the non-governmental Gender Water Alliance, talks
to Terra Viva’s Richel Langit-Dursin about women participation in water
management issues.
Q: Why do we have few women involved in decision-making?
A: It depends on where meetings are organised. It depends on the timing of the meetings. Often, there are cultural constraints in many of the countries like in India and in the Arab world where women cannot speak in front of men who are at the meeting. So if you have a mixed meeting, there are cultural constraints for women to speak. If the meetings are held late at night, women cannot come and there is a whole process of facilitating their participation. Women often feel that since they are not educated, they do not have the capacity to articulate their voice. You can also see from this summit that not too many women are present.
Q: What should we do to ensure women participation in decision-making process?
A: With the government, it’s a very slow process. We had to first build credibility, have the right data, and have the right arguments. You can’t be always criticising governments which you have to work with in partnership approaches. In some parts of India, we are doing this, but it has been a very slow process. Whenever I go to water meetings anywhere in the world, it’s still dominated by men and by technical agenda where the softer issues which we know are the more important ones are ignored.
Q: What are the positive impacts of involving women in decision-making process?
A: Involving women means that women also bring on board the needs of the poor and the marginalised groups. Women know the poor in the village, the most marginalised, the vulnerable, and other concerns. We’ve seen these things happening. We’ve seen women being very clear that if this water is for drinking water, no one can take for agriculture. People have to keep it clean. That means women cannot take it to wash clothes and other utensils.
Q: How true is the statement that women make better managers?
A: That’s what the World Bank said, but we don’t look at it like that. We think that involving women is about right, it’s about citizenship power, and it’s about what kind of government you want to create. However, the question that we are always asked is when we make women water managers, are we not increasing their work because they already have full day – collecting water, they are in the field, looking after children, cleaning the house and cooking?
Q: What are some of the water-related problems being faced by women?
A: We also know that many of the water-interventions like providing water supply close to the house or hand pumps increase women’s work. Women make more trips to collect water though the hand pumps may be close by. However, it’s a myth also to think that it’s always women who collect water. It’s not always that. Men also collect water, but 90 percent of women do.
Q: When Japan’s Crown Prince Naruhito showed a picture of women and children lining up for water in Nepal, what was your reaction?
A: The Prince said the picture was from 1986 and I was hoping that he would show a picture 20 years later of how it had changed because there have been good water programs in Nepal with a strong gender focus. There is a very big organisation, also one of our members – the Nepal Water and Health Foundation, which has done some very good work on addressing poverty and gender issues in Nepal.
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