COHRE Women and Housing Rights Fact Sheet No.6 Water & Sanitation

Marginalised groups, including women, require special attention due to their traditional and/or current exclusion from political power and resources required to ensure their human rights, including water and sanitation There is sufficient clean freshwater in the world for everyone’s basic personal and domestic needs It is estimated that nearly half the population of developing countries are suffering from diseases linked to inadequate water and sanitation

Women and Housing Rights WOMEN’S RIGHTS to Water and Sanitation

The human rights to water and sanitation are enshrined in international human rights law, including the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. At the same time, these rights are also inextricably related to the right to adequate housing. A home that lacks access to safe water

sufficient for personal and household needs, or which lacks basic sanitation facilities, is rendered uninhabitable. In most of the world, gender roles demand that women spend a great deal of time in the home, nurturing children and caring for the needs of their families. Household responsibilities also require women and girls to attend to various household chores, including providing - and using water for a variety of purposes. For women, the home may also be the principal place of employment or income generating activities, and access to water may be a necessary component of making one’s living.

General Comment No. 15 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights acknowledges that everyone has a right to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water to

satisfy personal and household needs.

The effects of insufficient water and poor sanitation are especially overwhelming for women and girls, who are usually responsible for collecting water for the family’s use. With water sources often hours away and located in unsecured terrain, women and girls are exposed to an increased risk of animal attacks, as well as physical and sexual violence.

It is necessary that water and sanitation projects explicitly address the particular needs of women. For example, as women and girls are generally more vulnerable to attack, water and sanitation facilities must be situated in locations which provide for their safety. In rural areas, this will generally demand that latrines are built within the house or yard. In urban areas, where space in informal settlements tends to be more restricted, there are various ways of ensuring improved security, but adequate lighting at the latrine and on the route to the latrine is critical.

Women and girls have the traditional role of collecting water, often from great distances, affecting their health, their access to education and ability to earn a livelihood. They are in greatest physical contact in the domestic environment with contaminated water and human waste, exposing them to a host of biological pathogens and chemical hazards, including when disposing of their own family’s waste.

water. As the collection of water often has to take priority over other activities, it prevents women and girls from engaging in other productive activities, education or other domestic responsibilities, rest and recreation.

Carrying heavy weights of up to 20 kilograms (the weight of 20 litres of water) can lead to back and joint problems as well as sprains and fractures from falls.

In some countries, spending five hours per day collecting water to meet the family’s needs is not unusual. Girls shoulder the burden of water-hauling in Asia and Africa. In Africa, forty billion working hours, or 25 per cent of household time, are spent each year carrying

Clean water is necessary to sustain human life and to ensure good health and human dignity. Yet more than one billion people do not have access to a safe water source and more than 2.6 billion people do not have adequate sanitation. The human rights to water and sanitation are crucial aspects of the struggle to improve this situation for the world’s poor.

Women’s uses of water are also often given less priority than men’s. In addition, women have often had unequal access to training and credit schemes, such as for latrine construction and water point management. In spite of women’s greater interest in such issues, water and sanitation projects may not address the greater need of women for privacy at water points (particularly for bathing) and sanitation facilities.

The UN Sub-Commission Guidelines for the Realization of the Right to Drinking Water and Sanitation recognise the difficulties that women face when it comes to securing their water and sanitation rights. The Guidelines stipulate that “Water and sanitation facilities should be designed to take account of the needs of women,” and, furthermore, that “Special efforts must be made to ensure the equitable representation in decision-making of vulnerable groups and sections of the population that have traditionally been marginalized, in particular women.”