water governance actors water governance actors in southern africa in southern africa
Realising the Human Right to Water in Malawi Power Balance and Women’s Participation in Water User Associations
Ngcimezile Mbano-Mweso Ngcimezile Mbano-Mweso is a law lecturer at the University of Malawi. She has an LLD on water governance from the University of the Western Cape, an LLM in human rights and democratisation in Africa from University of Pretoria and LLB (Hons) from University of Malawi. She lectures in gender and law, environmental law and water governance at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She is also the coordinator of Gender Justice Clinic, a learning platform for students and for community engagement to promote gender equality through advocacy, research for policy reforms and legal aid services. Her research interests are in human rights, gender, governance and environmental law.
Abstract Lack of universal access to water is one of the fundamental failures of development in the 21st century.Women not only disproportionately bear the burden of lack of safe water, but also have the least opportunity to take part in decisions regarding water services. This is a manifestation of the global water crisis caused by unequal relations of power, poverty and inequality related to gender, geographical location, class and race. Those who lack power find themselves at the peripheral of advantage from governance of water services. This paper argues that the iconic slogan ‘water is life’ must be understood in both a biological and social sense.The social sense entails participatory living of citizens as equals in a community with others. The human right to water guarantees such living by recognising people as agents who must have power to affect outcomes through genuine participation.With a focus on women in peri-urban and rural Malawi, the paper explores the issues of power, community participation and access to water through grounded research methodology. It interrogates Water User Associations as participatory spaces and finds that these are mainly spaces used as a means to fee collection and not empowerment. It concludes that the recognition and implementation of the human right to water in Malawi will provide an effective way of overcoming the lack of power and the ‘tyranny of participation’ which characterise water services in these areas. Keywords: Agency; community participation; human right to water; water governance; women
Introduction The rural and peri-urban areas in Malawi face numerous challenges in accessing water, particularly infrastructural and distributional problems (National Statistics Office, 2014, UNICEF, 2010). For instance, piped water in rural areas is provided through gravity fed schemes (GFS) constructed in the late 1960s and 1970s
(Kleemeier, 2000). The communities around the GFS were required to take basic responsibility of care and small repairs while government was responsible for major repairs and provision of spare parts. However, over the years both the government and communities neglected their role of maintaining the GFS. Poor maintenance and rapid population growth far exceeding the envisaged user population resulted in the dilapidation of schemes and /or
Lesedi #22 | Carnets de terrain | IFAS-Recherche | Octobre 2020
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