By Marwaan Macan-Markar
KYOTO, Japan, Mar 25 2003 (IPS)

By the end of an international conference on water here over the weekend, the world’s poorest women emerged as a barometer to judge the success rate of future global programmes for achieving water security.

That is because water binds women and the girl child: they bear double burdens, being among the world’s water poor in developing countries.

Women and girl children not only endure the lack of access to safe drinking water – like their male counterparts – but they also shoulder the heaviest weight of this lack – having to walk miles to collect water.

This image of women as the water bearers of their societies coursed through the debates and reports circulated at the Third World Water Forum (TWWF), held in this central Japanese city from Mar. 16-23.

‘Financing Water For All’, a new report released at the forum that lays down the blueprint on how developing countries should fund their water projects, was among the key publications drawing attention to the nexus between women and water.

”At the start of the Third Millennium, more than one person in three in the world suffers hardships and indignity from the problem of water. This person is much more often a woman than a man,” began the 54-page report produced by a panel chaired by Michel Camdessus, former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

”This injustice is largely unspoken and one of the most difficult to rectify, precisely because it is above all an injustice to women,” the report declares.

In Africa, for instance, researchers found that households spend 26 percent of their time, on average, fetching water, ”and it is generally women who perform this duty,” states another report on water and human rights jointly published by two U.N. agencies and three non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

”(Women) often suffer most from a lack of access to safe water and sanitation. Almost 70 percent of the 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty are women,” adds the report, ‘The Right to Water’.

According to a study by the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), an independent body striving to secure safe drinking water and adequate sanitation for the world’s poor, women in Africa and Asia have to walk close to six kilometres on average to collect water for domestic consumption.

”The weight of water that women in Africa and Asia carry on their heads is the equivalent of your airport luggage allowance (20 kilogrammes),” it adds.

At times, the average quantity of water they collect per day amounts to around five litres.

By contrast, the average person in the developing world consumes 10 litres of water a day, states the WSSCC, while an average person in the developed world, say Britain, uses 135 litres of water every day.

”This conference has acknowledge the additional burdens women and the girl child bear when they have to carry water over long distances,” says Shireen Lateef, a leading social development specialist at the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (AsDB).

But the next phase, adds Lateef, is as relevant – charting a programme that seeks to relieve women of the load they bear being among the water poor. ”But it is not enough to deliver water to women; they have to have a voice in how that water is delivered to them.”

For Richard Jolly, women cannot be left out of the equation in programmes seeking to supply water to the rural and urban poor, since they have a pivotal role as managers of water-use in domestic setting.

Often, it is low-cost technology and local solutions that are needed to ensure communities have safe water to drink and access to proper sanitation, adds Jolly, chairman of the WSSCC. ”Women are significant in such efforts.”

Achieving that is what ministers from over 100 countries pledged to do over the weekend. In a declaration endorsed on Sunday, at the end of a two-day special ministerial session on water, the ministers backed the need to be gender-sensitive in their planned water projects.

Currently, close to 1.1 billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water and 2.4 billion people have no access to adequate sanitation.

Under their commitments toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the world’s leaders have pledged to halve this number by 2015. At a U.N. summit on sustainable development in South Africa last September, governments agreed to seek solutions through public and private sector initiatives.

The months ahead will reveal how far governments are prepared to go in bringing the world’s poorest women into the network of those with access to safe drinking water.

One image that will serve as a useful measure of progress on this front is that of the women carrying buckets of water. A decline in thiw enduring image means that global water policies toward achieving water security are flowing toward their goal.

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