Gender Relations and Access to Water: What We Want to Know About Social Relations and Women's Time Allocation

Jessica Roy and Ben Crow

Center for Global, International and Regional Studies, Working Paper Series from Center for Global, International and Regional Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Abstract: Inadequate access to safe water has severe consequences for health and livelihood. More than one billion people do not have access to safe water. This paper addresses three questions: 1) How could a focus on social relations illuminate access to water? 2) Is there statistical evidence of a water-poverty connection? 3) How could time allocation studies improve our understanding of access to water? First, evidence suggests that in much of the rural global South, gender relations in particular mediate the social relations of water in numerous, interconnecting ways. Analysis of gender relations could then improve our understanding of the multiple connections among poverty, the position of women and access to water. Second, statistical evidence from the Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment Report 2000 and from the World Development Report 2000 indicates that there is a correlation between lack of access to water and material poverty. When people lack access to water and material resources, they are unable to realize their own hopes for life. Third, in order to improve our understanding of how people in the global South obtain water, future studies will need to determine precisely who collects and manages water for various uses, how much time water collection consumes, and the quality of water available to each user.

Keywords: Environment; and; Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-03-26
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/0m5033gv.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:glinre:qt0m5033gv

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Center for Global, International and Regional Studies, Working Paper Series from Center for Global, International and Regional Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().