Engendering Facts
Do you know that in Uganda the Water Sector has been able to incorporate gender concerns through strategic planning?
Uganda despite having huge fresh water resources, rapid population growth, industrialization, environmental degradation and pollution led to fast depletion and degradation of the available water resources. The National Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP), which is the key government framework for ensuring poverty eradication through creation of an enabling environment for rapid economic development and social transformation, therefore recognized water as the key sector. In Uganda it is the Ministry of Water and Environment (MoWE) that has the overall responsibility for initiating the national policies and for setting national standards and priorities for water development and management.During the late 1990’s Uganda was known to have gender sensitive approach to development but for the water and sanitation sector. In a gender sensitive system of governance the relevant machinery facilitates the process of mainstreaming so that both men and women are given opportunity to participate in the development process equitably.
In 1999 the Government came up with a Water Policy which provides the policy framework for water resources management and development. In the same year the National Gender Policy was announced which recognizes women and children “as the main carriers and users of water. It brings in the importance of gender responsiveness in terms of planning, implementation and management of water and sanitation initiatives” (Uganda National Water Development Report 2005). The Directorate of Water Development (DWD) is the government sector lead agency responsible for managing water resources, co-coordinating and regulating all sector activities and consists of the Director's office and three technical departments namely Rural Water and Supply Department, Urban Water and Sewerage Department and Water Resources Management. The DWD soon recognized the need for an explicit strategy towards mainstreaming gender and in 2003 published an explicit strategy to help mainstream gender into its plans and activities as outlined in the National Gender Policy.
The Water Sector Gender Strategy aims to enhance gender equity, participation of both women and men in water management, and equal access to and control over water resources in order to alleviate poverty. The Strategy specifically addresses the plight of women who are faced, by among other constraints, the following: walking long distances to fetch water; inadequate participation in the decision making process e.g. low representation on Water User Committees; lack of access to relevant information, say regarding the possible technology options, rationale for levying of water user fees, etc; inadequate security at and to the water points for children and women who are vulnerable to rape, harassment and torture. The Strategy also sets out clear aims, rationales and targets. It is designed to provide guidelines to water sector stakeholders on how to mainstream gender in their work plans and for the planning and implementation of water and sanitation programmes within the decentralized districts. Accordingly, the DWD in its strategy paper sets the gender goals as under:
- Women and men will be represented in all decision-making forums of the water sector.
- Commitment will be secured from top management and investors in the sector to work towards greater gender equality.
- Institutions feeding personnel into the sector will collaborate to incorporate appropriate gender curriculum and improved admission targets by 25 per cent. Recruitment criteria and procedures will be altered for gender sensitivity.
- The Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation (PHAST) tool will be adopted to integrate hardware water supply with awareness building on gender at the community level, hygienic use of water and community based monitoring of water supplies.
It is also to be noted that the Sector Wide Approach (SWAP) framework has been adopted by the water sector in Uganda in the reform era. SWAP is a mechanism where Government and development partners agree on a strategy to achieve improvement in sector performance and more effective use of financial resources through programs rather than projects. It is characterized by a highly consultative process where all stakeholders fully participate in the planning and implementation of all sector programs. The SWAP framework, which has been embraced by both government and the water sector development partners, has already proved to be the most appropriate mechanism for resources mobilization and implementation of the action plans.
All the DWD Departments have technical staff who handle water sector ‘hardware’ activities, as well as social scientists who handle the ‘software’ activities. Gender falls under the software activities, while the hardware activities include engineering and physical infrastructure. The work plan from the Rural Water Department of Uganda reflects how gender mainstreaming had been translated into planning for rural water development. In 2004 a plan was made for the implementation of software activities. The 2004 plan was able to allocate 12 per cent of the total budget to the software activities which formerly had only been done in an ad hoc manner. “The sector guideline for 2005/6 also specifies that up to 12 per cent of the total water sector conditional grants can be spent on software steps …” (Ministry of Water, Lands & Environment, 2004). These steps include activities related to advocacy, meetings, and trainings at every stage of the technical work to be done. The Senior Water Officer in Charge of Management Information Systems at the DWD noted that “there is now funding for community mobilization. It has risen from 3 to 12 per cent. The funding for districts can be used for software activities and gender falls there.” (www.genderandwater.org) This addresses gender concerns because women within the communities are to be trained together with men through such initiatives. It is hoped that government will continue to increase funding to these and other software activities as the need arises and that budgets are consciously allocated to gender mainstreaming and not just by proxy.
Since the mid 1980s, Uganda has taken vigorous steps to revamp the water sector and establish a comprehensive institutional framework for the management and development of the country’s water resources. This has gone in consonant with other national initiatives (i.e. Decentralization, Privatization, Gender Emancipation, etc) geared towards the redefinition of the roles of the different levels of government, with the central government creating the enabling environment for action by local governments, communities, and the private sector. Thus, while mainstreaming gender at the national policy level in Uganda it also got translated with work plans and activities at the decentralized district level
The success lies in the clear gender perspective planning with focused objectives and activities. Indicators for monitoring progress were also made gender sensitive and a collaborative approach on the part of the government with multiple stakeholders remains a crucial step towards mainstreaming gender in the water sector in Uganda.
