Is the answer a cup?

After publishing the previous post, I have continued my reading on issues relating to female sanitation. I came across this article on the Huffington Post, which describes how menstrual cups might be part of a solution to some of the gendered sanitation problems I discusses earlier. I thought I would just share some of the overall points with you.

Basically, menstrual cups are made of silicone “and are inserted into the vagina to collect, rather than absorb menstrual fluid” (Rubil 2014:online). They can usually provide about 12 hours of protection and the cup can be reused up to 10 years. The cup is pictured in image 1 below.

Image 1: Menstruation cup (from: Rubil 2014)

This simple technology has two very important benefits:

·       12 hours of protection means that women can get through a school day without having to worry about finding safe sanitary facilities near the school

·       Once a cup is required the monthly expense of buying sanitary pads disappears

Despite these advantages, the need for safe sanitary facilities has not disappeared, but perhaps the menstruation cup can be part of an interim solution? Have a look at the article, a let me know what you think!

I realise that all this talk about periods might not be most people’s average conversation topic, but I believe that it is absolutely crucial to talk about these issues, take them seriously and get over their taboo-status!   

A Gendered Perspective on Water and Sanitation

In this post I want to focus on how issues of water and sanitation are gendered. I particularly want to address how sanitary facilities affect women’s experience of menstruation, and how these in turn create specifically gendered challenges to development.

Within development literature, there is a strong argument in support of female empowerment. One particular line of argument emphasises the need for increased female education as many developing countries see a greater level of education among the male population compared to the female (DFID 2005). Multiple reasons are used to explain this situation. The distribution of domestic housework is one proposed reason, which is also intimately linked to the issue of water and sanitation. Women in East Africa are expected to do the majority of domestic housework, which also includes collecting water for the household. Household responsibilities are time consuming and can involve hard physical labour that limits ability to attend school (World Bank 1999). Findings from Thompsonet al. (2000) suggest that this issue is further exacerbated in East Africa, as water collection time has increased over the past 30 years:

“…the total time spent collecting water at the source each day increased more than three times, from 27.7 minutes in that late 1960s to 91.7 minutes 30 years later […] the most important explanatory factor is the increase in time spent queuing for water” (Thompson etal. 2000:48).

The increased collection time particularly affects women and children that are in charge of water collection. This detracts time from other activities such as going to school.  

Another reason, which might help to explain the educational gender-gap is women’s experience of menstruation. This is a topic of research that only recently has been explored in development literature, but sanitation concerns are at the heart of these new understandings, and thus very interesting to consider here. The main assertion is that young women in numerous ways are prevented from attending education due to their monthly period. In the bullet points below I have tried to explain some of the reasons why this is the case:

·    Due to limited economic resources many women have insufficient access to sanitary towels. This increases the risk of bleeding through clothes, which can simply prevent girls from leaving their house until the bleeding has stopped. If at school, signs of bleeding are likely to result in mocking and bulling creating a hostile learning environment (Bax 2014)

·   Poor sanitation facilities in schools make it much more difficult for young female students to change and wash in privacy – again this creates an obstacle for women to attend school and arguably highlights the “gender discriminatory nature of the school environment” (Sommer 2010:526)

·   Menstruation increases fears of rape and unwanted pregnancies. Parents in turn restrict their daughters during their period. Sommer (2009) finds that many girls have to be home by 6pm, which prevents them from getting study support from outside the household and prevents them from participating in group discussions and communal learning outside school hours.

Menstruation can thus be seen to create a host of barriers that prevent women from participating fully in education. In a study from Tanzania, young women were asked to draw their ideal school toilet. They emphasised a need for separate male and female facilities. Key elements to their design also included locks, creating a feeling of safety; running water inside the toilet booth, to enable easy hand washing; and good bins for disposal, to ensure continued freshness (Sommer 2010). Considering women’s experiences of menstruation highlights how issues of sanitation are gendered. It also emphasises how the need for basic services is experienced very differently by different groups of people.

Water Vending

Lately I have been reading about water provision in urban slums in an attempt to better understand how residents deal with lacking water infrastructure and what further consequences this lack might have. Using the case study of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I want to explore the adaptive capacity of private or commercial water vending.  

Dar es Salaam is the biggest city in Tanzania. In 2012 the population was estimated at 4 million, of which 70% are believed to live in informal settlements (BBC 2012). The parastatal organisation Dar es Salaam Water and Sewage Authority (DAWASA) is responsible for the city’s piped water system. Rapid urban growth coupled with diminishing economic resources and a lack of urban planning has resulted in inadequate basic infrastructures. Glöckner et al.(2004) suggest that less than half of the households in Dar es Salaam have direct access to the utilities provided by DAWASA. This leaves the bulk of the population in search for alternative water sources.

As mentioned in a previous post the specific characteristics that define the urban have an important influence on the available alternative ways of accessing water. Compared to rural areas, urban dwellers have less access to unprotected (and often free) sources of water. Instead illegal tapping, local community-scale initiatives and private sources become increasingly important.

In a journal article from 2000, Kjellen explores small-scale water vending in Dar es Salaam. She explicitly focuses on vendors who sell water in jerry cans and distribute it using pushcarts. She finds that private water vending is both a source of employment for primarily young men, but also that it provides basic water services to “a significant number of households” (Kjellen2000:146).  Most of the water distributed by vendors was tapped from public utilities and thus works as a substitute for the lacking pipe system. Kjellen (2000) finds that water prices are determined particularly by how difficult the distribution is – so how complicated it is for the vendor to get to the household. Depending on location, different households will pay different prices for water.

Although prices will vary it is overall much more expensive to buy water from vendors (Glöckner et al. 2004). This means that households that are already excluded from the very basic infrastructural services are further disadvantaged. In the long run it is much cheaper for a household to be connected to the piped utilities, but the up-front investment when building this connection excludes a majority of households that are not able to make such savings. As a result un-served households rely on higher price alternatives, which decreases the amount of water a household can afford to buy, and in turn creates an obstacle for good hygiene practices (Whittington et al.1989). In addition to the disadvantaged price, Kjellen (2000) also argues that the private vendors are inferior in terms of water quality. The risk of contamination is arguably greater with private vendors, as the water is poured into different containers during distribution. Each time water is poured into a new container the risk of contamination increases.

Despite the different disadvantages of commercial vending, it is still considered an interim solution to the lacking infrastructures in Dar es Salaam. Developing the piped system does not seem like an immediate possibility. Instead Kjellen(2000) suggests that making other smaller infrastructural improvements might better the situation for households and vendors. If access to households is improved, for instance with better roads or paths, then distribution will ease and prices fall. Consequently, it is thought that more water can be distributed, perhaps enabling better hygiene practices.  

Improved According to Whom?

The UN and WHO (2015:52) define sanitation on a four-step ladder, which I have outlined below (from lowest to highest sanitation ‘quality’):

1.     Open defecation: when human waste is disposed of in nature, open spaces or with solid waste (unimproved sanitation)

2.     Unimproved sanitation facilities: where human excreta is not separated from human contact (unimproved sanitation)

3.     Shared sanitation facilities: enables disposal of human excreta without human contact, but is shared between two or more households (unimproved sanitation)

4.     Improved sanitation facilities: enables disposal of human excreta without human contact and is not shared between households (improved sanitation)  

In this post I want to focus on the third step on the ladder, the shared sanitation facilities, and use a study by Schouten and Mathenge (2010) to highlight how the official definition of improved/unimproved sanitation, might not always match the experiences on the ground.

Schouten and Mathenge (2010) carry out an assessment of shared sanitation facilities in the large slum, Kibera, located south west of the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. Their main research focus is how local users perceive shared sanitation facilities, which are the most common type of facility in the area. They assess the criteria by which local dwellers perceive facilities and find seven main determinants for satisfaction - these are displayed in the pie chart below (figure 1).

Figure 1: Most important criteria for satisfaction with communal sanitation facilities (Schouten and Mathenge 2010, 820)  

      Schouten and Mathenge (2010) find that the success criteria put forward by local dwellers do not always match other stakeholder’s views of success. For instance, some NGOs in the area advocate biogas toilets due to a number of practical considerations – they do not acquire emptying as often as other facilities such as pit latrines, they are not dependent on water or sewage connections and they potentially produce a source of electricity. However, the biogas facilities achieve the lowest satisfaction score (when compared to VIP latrines, pour flush toilets and WCs) from local dwellers. Users are particularly unhappy with the smell in biogas toilets, which means the facilities do not perform well in the most important criteria for local dwellers – cleanliness.

Just as local stakeholders do not always agree on the criteria for success, Schouten and Mathenge (2010) argue that the official definition of improved sanitation may be challenged. They find that slum dwellers perceive individual sanitation facilities as a practical impossibility, while well constructed and properly maintained shared facilities are considered the most appropriate. This leads the authors to argue that if shared facilities meet the most valued criteria of the local dwellers (such as cleanliness), then a shared facility may actually be an improved sanitation option, counter to the UN/WHO definition.

I guess this definition issue is most important in terms of statistics and measuring improvement, while on a daily basis it matters less to local dwellers whether their sanitation facilities are defined as improved or not. What really matters is that facility’s ability to meet preferences and demand. In my opinion, what the article by Schouten and Mathenge (2010) most importantly does is to call for local participation when working to improve sanitation. User preferences and their understanding of improved are of utmost importance.  

k