Blue Planet Run Foundation Provides Hope at African Women and Water Conference
Blue Planet Run Foundation taps into the deeper running issues African women face when they lack access to water. The first ever African Women and Water Conference was recently held at the Greenbelt Center (home of Nobel Laureate, Wangari Maathai’s, Greenbelt Movement to plant trees). Annette Faye, a representative of BPRF’s Peer Water Exchange reports her findings:
Why would women need to gather to discuss the topic of water?
- Pastoral women wake up at pre-dawn hours to walk great distances in order to collect water and relieve themselves. By midday they must walk out into the desert at a greater distance to avoid being seen, often returning ashamed and sometimes soiled.
- Water privatization makes water inaccessible to most because it raises prices. Male water vendors dominate the communal water points, so women have to wait in long lines. Women get beaten if it takes too long to return home, accused by the husbands that they are cheating on them.
- Desperate women exchange sex for water to avoid the line.
Every single women agreed, and took for granted, that water is their responsibility and that it’s a problem.
The AWWC, held in Kenya, was comprised of 30 women from all over Africa. These women were eager to learn and share with their communities. The five-day schedule was packed, going well into the evening. Between activities women broke into song and dance. They learned how to implement new technologies, write business plans, test water’s safety, and use the Peer Water Exchange collaborative model. The women were excited to join a global network and liked that the PWX application is standardized.
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A big take-away: investing time to teach a community how to use new technologies is a must. In resource-poor areas, people are used to being creative and it can sometimes backfire. For example, one trainer’s son cut headlights out of her first Solar Cook-it to make a toy truck. On the last day, the group visited a Sand Dam built by the Greenbelt Movement six years earlier. Wangari Maathai told us she’d just seen pictures of the current state of the Sand Dam. She was discouraged because it is barely functioning – the community hasn’t taken the extra steps to own and maintain the project.
The importance of working with grassroots women who are usually left out of the real discussions in development was reinforced throughout the conference. One of the greatest things about PWX is that it is working to solve this problem and I’m looking forward to supporting this effort. Thanks BluePlanetRun!
“Water privatization makes water inaccessible to most because it raises prices”
I wrote my MSc dissertation on water supply in Africa; this oft-repeated statement is very misleading and massivley oversimplifies the problem. I really need to summarise my work somewhere so I can just go “here’s the link”.
Other than that, thanks for the article it’s very good - local people taking the “extra steps to own and maintain the project” is a really important point.