Gender & Water Community

Pipes but no water: A need grows in Egypt: CAIRO: The women line up at a well, jugs in hand and on their heads, to draw water. It is a pastoral scene celebrated in paintings and in Middle Eastern lore from ancient times. This tableau, however, is in a treeless alley in 21st-century Cairo, the biggest city in Africa. As the Nile River flows abundantly by to the east, residents in the Saft al-Laban neighborhood carry out a ritual of desperation, not tradition… Read the entire post on Blue Gold.

No more trips to the well, drinking straight from the tap in India: For the first time in India, residents of Jamshedpur can get safe, potable drinking water straight from their household taps. The connections, which can cost willing residents an entire month’s salary, mark a turn in the way Indian’s receive their water. Read the entire post on Circle of Blue.

Read a report on the recent two-day International Conference on Gender, Migration and Development, which ended 26 September 2008 which concluded with the adoption of the 19-point ‘Manila Call to Action 2008′. This reiterated the urgency of addressing the issues of seizing opportunities to enhance gender equality and benefits of migration for women and their families, and upholding their rights…Read the entire post. Conference website.

British drinking water ‘may be tainted with prescription drugs’: Britain’s drinking water supplies will be tested for safety amid fears that rivers are contaminated with prescription drugs. Cancer drugs are of particular concern because they dissolve easily in water… Read the entire post on Blue Gold.

Sixty African women scientists whose work ranges from soil science to animal genetics to tackling the challenges of water management, have received the first fellowships granted by AWARD, G&D’s new program for African Women in Agricultural Research and Development. Designed to enhance the careers of women agricultural scientists in sub-Saharan Africa, AWARD is supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID. For details on these outstanding women and the AWARD program, read the Press Release.

The MRC /BDP programme is urgently looking for qualified candidates to fill in this position. If you are interested, please send your application, CV and any of your relevant report/publication to suparerk@mrcmekong.org. Read the Terms of Reference.

Suparerk Janprasart
Sociologist/Socio-economist
Basin Development Plan Programme
Mekong River Commission Secretariat
Vietinae, Lao PDR

Through ISEAL Alliance, an international non-profit organisation that codifies best practice for the design and implementation of social and environmental standards initiatives, the following vacancies are advertised:

Program Officer, WWF-US Aquaculture Program

World Wildlife Fund (WWF) seeks a program officer to be the WWF-US Aquaculture Program’s primary point of contact with seafood buyers (e.g., retailers, food service companies and brands), so as to encourage participation in and/or support of the Aquaculture Dialogues . This position will be based in Europe. Job details.

FISHERY ASSESSMENT MANAGER, Marine Stewardship Council

Seize this great opportunity to join a forward thinking and rapidly growing organisation and make a positive impact on global fisheries conservation.  Lend your fisheries expertise to MSC’s mission of helping transform global fisheries through its leading international certification and eco-labelling programme for well-managed and sustainable fisheries – a programme distinguished by high scientific standards, independence, transparency, stakeholder engagement and comprehensive consistency with FAO guidelines. Job details.

UNESCO Water Portal Newsletter No. 208: Water and Peace in Celebration of the International Day of Peace

In this issue you will find: Facts and figures about water and peace, vacancies, UNESCO featured events and publications

WaterAid International E-News September 2008

Breaking taboos, laughing about loos, last chance for poverty targets, and more.

NeWater NeWsletter No 6

Next to the announcement of NeWater related meetings, this newsletter gives details on the final conference (17th-19th November), introduces the NeWater Portal and presents case study examples from Nile and Ohre (Elbe basin).

Women for Water Partnership

The Women for Water Partnership (WfWfW) is an alliance of local, national and international women’s organisations working on sustainable development, with a main focus on water & sanitation issues and poverty eradication in a gender sensitive way. At a policy level, Women for Water is committed to the implementation of the Dublin Principles – 2 and 3 in particular -, Agenda 21, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – MDG 1 ,3,7 en 8 in particular - and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPoI) . It focuses on bridging the gaps between the internationally agreed principles for sustainable development and the day-to-day practice in water management, including sanitation.

Check out their objectives. Or read their blog.

Women of Water

The mission of Women of Water is to make available a non-profit organization for women involved in all aspects of the water business, whether in manufacturing, consulting engineering, academia, government, or not-profit organizations, to come together to learn, grow, reach out, network, and mentor…

Capacity Building Programme Officer, Gender and Water Alliance (GWA), The Netherlands
12 months contract with optional extension after clear evidence of eligibility and if financing of GWA permits
Deatils can be found here.

Gender, Water and Equity: Training Programme, October 20-24, 2008

Organised by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, South Asian Consortium for Interdisciplinary Water Resources Studies (SaciWATERs), Hyderabad, Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM), Pune, and the Gender and Water Alliance (GWA).

Details can be found here.

The WorldFish Center’s Gender Section and their work:

Women play a key role in fisheries, particularly in developing countries. They are the dominant actors in fish processing and local trade, and many are involved in small-scale aquaculture operations. Many of the poorest families in rural communities are headed by women…

A guiding principle for all WorldFish projects is a focus on gender equality…

WorldFish designs its programs with the particular needs of women in mind…

There is a Gender and Fisheries Network which provides a platform for information sharing and collaborative research among scientists, development and extension workers and managers or you can visit their extensive library for resources on gender and fisheries.

Today on ODI’s Blog: MDG 6 can not be immune to the importance of gender, posted by Cora Walsh and Nicola Jones. Here a few excerpts:

With Ban Ki-moon hosting a High-Level event on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) this week, the MDGs are once again under the world spotlight….

For our part, we will emphasise the important role that gender plays across all of the MDGs at a side event today: Engendering pro-poor change: Putting gender at the heart of the MDGs. As noted in a recent ODI briefing paper, ‘The fact is that experiences of poverty differ according to sex, age, ethnicity and location. However, gender is only explicit in MDGs 3 and 5’….

Read the full entry on ODI.

Researcher - Remote Sensing & GIS at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) who will be based in Africa or Sri Lanka and will be working with IWMI’s Water Availability and Access Theme. See their website for details.

ODI organises the following event tomorrow:

Engendering pro-poor change: Putting gender at the heart of the MDGs

Tuesday 23rd September, 9.00 - 11.30am, UN Millennium Plaza Hotel, New York

To ensure that there are more partnership events for the MDG Summit in September that specifically addresses gender equality issues, ODI is hosting a gender side event with support from the Foreign Ministry of Denmark.

Please note the deadline for registration is Sunday 21 September 2008, if you hurry, you can still make it

Funding News

Download a list of funding news for September 2008 composed by CGIAR’s Gender and Diversity program which includes opportunities for young women scientists, fellowship programs, prizes and awards and more.

Workplace diversity: how to manage?

Beyond Diversity: Becoming a Culturally Competent Organization
How one of Canada’s leading financial institutions sets a best-practice example…

The Business Case for Diversity
having a diverse workforce is a competitive advantage, creating more innovative products…

Diversity in the Workplace: Benefits, Challenges, and the Required Managerial Tools
globalisation involves inter-cultural communication, in such an environment it is key for organisations to become more creative and open for change, read on for the challenges and the benefits to be more diverse…

Lack of Ideas: Diversity Bring More to the Team’s Table
some approches to creating a collaborative working environment…

Managing Diversity in the Workplace
what do managers need to know to create and sustain a diverse workplace?

Working with Diversity in Collaborations: Tips and Tools, G&D Working Paper no. 39
A tested series of practical exercises and tools to help you fully leverage the benefits of diversity when working in multicultural teams, partnerships and collaborations.

More on Cross-cultural Communication, Diversity and Multiculturalism.

Announcements

2nd World Agroforestry Congress, 23-28 August 2009, Nairobi, Kenya

This congress serves as a forum for agroforestry researchers, educators, practitioners and policy makers from around the world. For more information visite the conference website.

This WWW stands for World Water Week, the annual signature event of Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), which took place from 17-23 August, 2008 with over 2,000 participants and more than 200 collaborating organisations to promote the exchange of views and experiences on everything touching on water and development.

Of the 11 participants from Australia, representing researchers from the scientific and academic community, business and the government, RMAP was represented by Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt. Kuntala participated in her capacity as a member of the Steering Committee of Gender Water Alliance (GWA), a meeting of which preceded
the WWW in Stockholm.

Here extracts from her report which you can download here: RMAP at Stockholm’s WWW:

GWA organised, jointly with Saferworld, a UK-based NGO, a half-day session on Conflicts over Water and Water to Solve Conflicts on Sunday, the 17th of August, 2008. The idea of the session arose from the fact that at times new water development projects seem to have impacted on unpredictable ways, fuelling violence in particular in areas already affected by conflict. Read more…

A theme that predominated this year’s WWW discussions was climate change and its impacts on water. The water sector has paid little attention to and is often unaware of the impacts of climate change on future water resources. Clearly as the societies learn to live with the greater uncertainties arising from climate change, water professionals will need to adapt to climate change. They will need to deal more effectively with risks and uncertainties, and prioritise the reduction of vulnerabilities of people to shifts in hydro-meteorological trends.
An important aspect of the changes is that the water sector should not be gender-blind in locating the impacts or in mitigation policies….

Entire report.

Found on the Water for the Ages Blog: Akvopedia: Open Source for Water Technology

The new website Akvopedia shares knowledge of water and sanitation technology, open source style, to ensure these resources are available to more people worldwide…Read on

Akvopedia is like Wikipedia an opensource encyclopedia that anyone can access and edit. The site contains:

News, Featured Projects, a Blog, and more. Check it out for yourself and get involved!

• Promising approaches to address the needs of poor female farmers: Interventions to increase women’s access to and control of agricultural resources

Authors: A. Quisumbing; L. Pandolfelli, Publisher: International Food Policy Research Institute , 2008

A new briefing note brought out by the International Food Policy Research Institute compiles examples of gender-sensitive interventions from Sub Saharan Africa and South Asia that have increased women’s access to and control of agricultural resources and shares the lessons learnt.

Drawing on experiences from seventeen countries, the note lists specific steps that can be taken to help improve women’s access to each of these resources. Full text.

• Poverty and Water– Explorations of the Reciprocal Relationship: Ed. by David Hemson, Kassim Kulindwa, Haakon Lein and Adolfo Mascarenhas; CROP International Studies in Poverty Research, Zed Books, London, 2008. Order the book.

The relationship posited is twofold: the poor lack adequate access to water and the absence of water in turn means not merely an inadequacy of a basic life-need but also a constraint on livelihoods and on the generation of income. Inadequate and unequal access to water is thus both a result and a cause of poverty. It follows – and this is the important argument of the book – that water is central to any programme for the reduction of poverty… Book launch report.

• Seen on Land and People: The status of rural poverty in the Near East and North Africa

Authors: I. Christensen; B. Veillerette; S. Andricopulos; Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)
Publisher: International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2007

This report focuses on key rural poverty issues in 13 diverse countries in the region, Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen, without attempting to propose policy or programme actions at national or local levels. Available online

On Dev-Zone: Chief of Water and Sanitation, located in Kabul, working for DACAAR (Danish Comittee for Aid to Afghan Refugees), closind date: 28-Sep-2008. More details.

From ANUWI: Researcher position in Water Services Regulations, Dundee UNESCO Centre for Water Law, Policy and Scienceat the University of Dundee. Closing Date: 30 Sep 2008. More details.

Gender and the Built Environment - gendersite.org is a website that comprises a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary database of

• bibliographic references,
• policy documents
• web resource, and
• case studies

relating to issues around gender and the built environment. The project was developed as part of a knowledge exchange programme designed to gather together existing academic research across the social sciences, gender studies, architecture and planning, and make it readily accessible, in one location, to practitioners and professionals working in the field of the built environment.

Project realistion by Women’s Design Service, Queen Mary, University of London, and UrbanBuzz

The database is easy searchable and contains bibliographies, books, unpublished phds, journal articles, legislations, working papers, reports and more.

To get yourself acquainted with the topic I suggest to start with one of the case studies, for example Gendered Space in Traditional Architecture, …

No search possibility for ‘water’ yet, but two results returned for sanitation! Maybe, you can add a case study or publication?!

Flushing your toilet is a luxury! Julie Chowdhury on the WIP (Women’s International Perspective) reports back from the WWW in Stockholm. She also summarises the seminar organised by the GWA and Safer World. Here a few excerpts:

…The water crisis is driven by many factors such as inequality and poverty, where the burden falls most heavily on women…

…gender is a key variable in all water sectors…

… effective, efficient and equitable management of water resources is only achieved when women and men are equally involved in the consultation processes as well as in the management and implementation of water related services.

Read on.

Uganda’s gender imbalance in school is linked to water scarcity: Hey, someone has to go an fetch that water! and sure enough, that’s a girl’s job! This is the findings of a recent study which concludes that the provision of tuition fees and other supply side-based interventions to achieve gender equality may not be successful if they are implemented in ignorance of pupils’ livelihood situations. Read the full story on allAfrica.com

Also in India: More on Barrier’s to rural girls’ education by Dr Lalit Kishore on mynews.in who names a few: early marriages and low status of women, remote small villages - boys over girls, private schools only for boys, remoteness of highschool location, lack of female teachers and more. Read on.

The crucial role that forests play in rainharvesting: discussed in an interview with 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai on the CircleofBlue Blog.

Women and land rights in South Africa: As time marches on in the democratic South Africa and milions of Rand are raised for alleviating the plight of poor black women, but the narrative remains unchanging…The story of rural women in South Africa continues to be the story of female-headed households eking out a meagre existence on the margins of society,.. Found on Rami Zurayk’s Land and People blog.

Not a very good review for a latest movie which titles: The Women directed by Diane English. Not worth to watch it! Read it on boston.com.

Professor Joan Rose receives first Hei-jin Woo Award for Achievements of Women in the Water Profession for her contribution to Water Quality and the Protection of Health Worldwide.
The IWA Hei-jin Woo Award is dedicated to the memory of Hei-jin Woo, a leading Korean female engineer and scientist who worked in the water field… Read on on the BlueGold Blog.