Hygiene education for women is a standard component of water supply projects. However, evaluations frequently reveal little change in hygiene and sanitation behaviour and so water-related illnesses persist. Why is it so hard to convey water-related health messages?

Researchers from UK University of Bradford tackle this issue in an assessment of Ghana’s Upper Region Water Supply Project (URWSP). They argue for a more rigorous analysis of the cultural and gender-related factors that influence women's acceptance and understanding of these messages.

URWSP has installed 2,600 handpumps on boreholes, providing clean water for some 1.2 million people. However, repeated attempts to promote the use of communal waste dumps and latrines (by subsidised provision of squatting slabs) have failed. Sanitation and hygiene behaviour in the URWSP communities has not improved despite almost twenty years of health education. Women remain generally unaware of the connection between personal and domestic hygiene, faecal contamination and diarrhoea. Waste water is still allowed to collect around handpumps, providing breeding conditions for mosquitoes. Human excreta, animal droppings and household waste continue to be dumped indiscriminately. People rarely wash their hands after defecation and most stored domestic water is contaminated. Why are these results so disappointing?

URWSP started as a top-down technical project. Subsequent add-on ‘community education’ components were delivered by a centralised cadre of male experts. Participation of women has been minimal:

• Water pump caretakers are male.
• Men dominate water use committees, although women do most of the work (keeping the pump site clean, collecting water and paying water tariffs).
• Most village education workers are male civil servants doing a second job.
• In those communities where there are female community water organisers, they are not chosen by women but appointed by chiefs.

Other findings include:

• Health education interventions often fail by targeting only women. Behaviour will only change when men are involved.
• Attempts to mobilise women to promote the use of latrines ignore the traditional use of human waste as a fertiliser.
• It is unrealistic to expect women to divert household investment towards clean bathrooms and latrines as men usually control household resources.
• Family tensions arise if women are asked to attend meetings and training sessions when their husbands are not convinced of the project's relevance.
• Women have arduous workloads and limited time so they continue to draw water from the nearest source, regardless of its quality. This defeats the project objective of encouraging sole use of pumped borehole water.

These lessons from URWSP show that water project planners need to:

• prioritise sanitation and hygiene, given the proven link between improved sanitation and decreased diarrhoea and infant mortality
• understand how the social context may inhibit the effective use of water facilities
• educate men on the use and misuse of water.

Source(s):
‘Water supply, sanitation and hygiene: analysis of connecting factors in northern Ghana’, University of Bradford Development and Project Planning Centre Discussion Paper Series 2 No. 20, by S. Kendie, 1999

Funded by: Association of Commonwealth Universities

id21 Research Highlight: 25 June 2002

Further Information:
Stephen Kendie
Centre for Development Studies
University of Cape Coast
Cape Coast
Ghana

University of Cape Coast, Ghana

Leslie Knight
Administrator
Bradford Centre for International Development
University of Bradford
Bradford
West Yorkshire
BD7 1DP
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1274 233975
Contact the contributor: l.j.knight@bradford.ac.uk

Bradford Centre for International Development

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