Deepa Joshi

Health, hygiene and appropriate sanitation: experiences and perceptions of the urban poor

“Don’t teach us what is sanitation and hygiene.” This quote from Maqbul, a middle-aged male resident in Modher Bosti, a slum in Dhaka city, summed up the frustration of many people living in urban poverty to ongoing sanitation and hygiene programmes. In the light of their experiences, such programmes provide “inappropriate sanitation”, or demand personal investments in situations of highly insecure tenure, and/or teach “hygiene practices” that relate neither to local beliefs nor to the ground realities of a complex urban poverty. A three-year ethnographic study in Chittagong, Dhaka, Nairobi and Hyderabad illustrated that excreta disposal systems, packaged and delivered as low-cost “safe sanitation”, do not match the sanitation needs of a very diverse group of urban men, women and children. It is of little surprise that the delivered systems are neither appropriate nor used, and are not sustained beyond the life of the projects. This mismatch, far more than an assumed lack of user demand for sanitation, contributes to the elusiveness of the goal of sanitation and health for all. The analysis indicates that unless and until the technical, financial and ethical discrepancies relating to sanitation for the urban poor are resolved, there is little reason to celebrate the recent global declaration on the human right to water and sanitation and health for all.

Menstrual hygiene management: education and empowerment for girls?

This paper discusses the recent attention of the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector to resolving the menstrual hygiene crisis for young girls in developing countries. Menstrual hygiene management (MHM) interventions, including the use of sanitary pads, education, and awareness, and where possible separate, sanitary toilets, are identified to have far-reaching impacts on the education and empowerment of girls. Field research conducted in Ghanas Northern Region indicates a pronounced socialized, sexualized understanding and experience of menstruation among young girls and their families, school teachers, and local NGOs. Unfortunately WASH initiatives only allow interventions to manage menstrual hygiene, leaving the young girls and others in their social settings to deal with the larger subset of sexuality issues. We argue that opening the dominant discourse of a medicalized concept of menstruation to other meanings and experiences will have significant implications for the education and empowerme...

Pavement dwellers' sanitation activities — visible but ignored

Pavement dwellers are often invisible to government, development partners and researchers, even though they comprise 2 per cent of the urban population and their entire lives are on full display to passers-by every day. Shelter and security, convenience and privacy are considered essential for all, yet even these are lacking for the poorest of the urban poor.

Feminist Solidarity? Women's Engagement in Politics and the Implications for Water Management in the Darjeeling Himalaya

Abstract This article explores the motivations of a diverse group of women in the Himalayan region of Darjeeling district in India to engage (or not) in politics, and discusses how women, like men, are vulnerable to power and politics. In Darjeeling, class, ethnicity, and other divides are accentuated by unresolved, decades-long identity-based political conflicts that also obscure practical everyday needs and challenges. This defines which women engage in the political domain and, in the dominantly patriarchal political space, how these women relate to the regions enduring water challenges. In such a setting, it would be ideal to wish for solidarity among women that would overcome class and ethnic divisions and individual political aspirations, making space for gendering political causes and practical challenges. Such solidarity would be especially pertinent in the Eastern Himalaya, given the regions projected climate vulnerability and fragile democracy. However, reality is far removed from development discourse and policy which suggests an assumed camaraderie among mountain women: an imagined empathy and solidarity in relation both to environmental causes and concerns and the practice of equitable power and politics. In looking at how a diverse group of women in varying positions of power and powerlessness in Darjeeling District are unable, reluctant, or simply uninterested in addressing critical water injustices experienced by some, this paper calls for retrospection on both gender–environment myths and gender–politics fictions.

Cultivating “success” and “failure” in policy: participatory irrigation management in Nepal

Introduced over a decade ago and considered largely successful by irrigation professionals, Irrigation Management Transfer and Participatory Irrigation Management (IMT/PIM) policies were recently reviewed and seen to have resulted in more cases of “failure” than “success”. Primary research on two IMT/PIM projects in Nepal, which were among the few “successes” in the assessment supporting a “failed” PIM, shows how such policy-driven evaluations, when defining success, overlook incongruities between policies, institutions, and the evolving dynamics around class, caste, ethnicity, and gender. Without exploring the dynamics of practice, the process of “cultivating” success and/or failure in evaluations provides little insight on how irrigation management works on the ground.

Gender Change in the Globalization of Agriculture

Almost two decades ago, feminist researcher Maria Mies asked, “What would an economy look like in which nature mattered, in which women mattered, in which children mattered, in which people mattered, [an economy] which would not be based on colonizing and exploiting others?” These are precisely the issues of concern today. Contemporary globalization relocates high value agricultural production to the Southern hemisphere for Northern markets and high-income consumers in general. A post-colonial globalization of agri-food and trade through corporatization of land is critiqued by many for undermining food security, for irreversibly altering ecological landscapes, and for marginalizing the poorest, including women, through traps of coercive wage labor opportunities that are grossly inequitable as well as limiting voice, dignity, and food sovereignty. Given the tenacious links drawn between the political, social, and economic dimensions of food insecurity and conflict, it appears that there is indeed a contemporary nexus between gender, environment, and conflict, it is manifested in and aggravated by the globalization of the agri-food system.

Manual scavenging - A life of dignity?

In many of Indias cities, domestic dry latrines are emptied daily, a task that has been forced traditionally on a group considered so lowly that they were placed outside the Hindu caste order. In spite of the fact that their ‘out caste’ position and work combine to reinforce their social ostracism, a latent fear persists, especially amongst their elders, that their livelihoods are being phased out along with dry latrines.

Land and Water Reforms in South Africa: "Men in White Coats"

Despite numerous legislative attempts to redress past injustices, the redistribution of land and/or water remains a key challenge in post-apartheid South Africa. South Africa is currently identified as being in a state of a water crisis – and there are contentious and deeply polarized viewpoints on how the water security situation is linked to the transformation agenda. Through the narrative of an “emerging” female black farmer’s experiences with land and water reforms, this article gives a first-person account of the institutional barriers that keep intact an unequal, inequitable and unjust agrarian structure. The analysis also makes explicit how the transformatory agenda does not address the complexity of inequalities by race, crosscut as they are by gender and other social variables. By aiming to integrate an erroneously conceived homogeneous formerly excluded in an agrarian system meant to exclude them, the post-apartheid land and water reforms not only fail, but in turn make the formerly excluded “failed”. These analyses suggest that a feminist agenda which calls for a structural overhaul of policies and strategies as well as institutional structures and cultures might provide a much-needed antidote to the de-railed reform/justice agenda in South Africa.

Flows of change: dynamic water rights and water access in peri-urban Kathmandu

Urbanization and the changing climate are increasingly influencing people’s access to land and water. Changes in use of, and rights and access to, land and water are most acutely experienced in peri-urban areas. We analyze these changes in peri-urban Kathmandu, Nepal. Increasing pressures on land and growing water needs of an expanding population in Kathmandu Valley are creating new patterns of water use, water-related conflicts, and (in)securities. We use two case studies that are characteristic of these changes, with a focus on the microlevel redefinitions of, and struggles about, rights, access, and notions of legitimate water use, and what these mean for water security and water conflict in a socially and institutionally complex and dynamic environment. Our findings show that these water-related changes cause contestations and conflicts between peri-urban water users. Amid increasing competition for water, people are using new sources and technologies, searching for negotiated solutions based on local norms and rights, and co-opting other water users through cooperation to create access opportunities and avoid conflicts. Our cases show self-restraint in practices of claiming or accessing water, while avoidance of conflicts also derives from an awareness of unequal power relations between user groups, past experiences of violence used against protesters, and lack of active intervention to regulate increasing exploitation of peri-urban land and water resources.