Catalog

Safe, Easy Water: When Women Want It, They Get It
ADB Review [ December 2006 - January 2007 ]

By Abby Tan
Consultant Writer for RSID's Cooperation Fund for the Water Sector

When potable water supply and sanitation finally started arriving in some of the most remote villages in the Philippines, project implementers noted a common factor: takecharge women.

LIFELINE Women deal with water from daybreak to sunset-making them the ideal and successful organizers and managers of local water user groups

Where women were organized and actively ran the local water user groups, projects succeeded, whether in northern tribal areas or the lowland areas of Samar, Leyte, and Panay islands.

"The relationship between women and water is life itself. Because from daybreak to sunset, women deal with water, in bathing, cooking, and washing. It is the lifeline for women," says ADB Gender Specialist Jennifer Francis. Women are also the primary caregivers of family members who fall ill from waterborne diseases. The lack of safe drinking water is a major culprit of the kinds of diseases which affect an average of two out of three people in rural Philippines.

To get at this problem, the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project aimed to bring safe and reliable water supply and sanitation systems, as well as education on health, hygiene, and monitoring water quality, to 3,000 of the most remote communities in 20 of the poorest provinces of the Philippines.

Ultimately, 60,000 toilets and latrines were built in villages and schools. "They can now take a bath daily. Before that they couldn't; it was a luxury to take a pail of water for bathing," says Project Consultant Edna Balucan.

The most efficient and self-sustaining of the projects have been where women's involvement was the highest. Ms. Balucan said women usually took over the discussions in the user group meetings—an observation shared by ADB Project Officer Paul van Klaveren. "From the men you get the formal answers," he says. "From the women, you get the real story."

These user groups were tasked with determining how the new water supply would be distributed and paid for. Having a say gave women a sense of ownership, which drove their enthusiasm for the project. The all-women board of the Bulan Bulan village user group in Guimaras used monthly fees to finance the construction of a water tank on top of a hill. A spring about 2 kilometers away supplied the tank, which fed water through a gravity system to 26 communal faucets that serve more than 100 households.

Women beneficiaries were also known to act on their own initiative. ADB Senior Urban Development Specialist Rudolf Frauendorfer recalled a woman in the Cordilleras who kept a meticulous record of how much she had collected from users and had spent on repairs for the village water system. "I was astounded," he says.

Similar female initiatives have been reported elsewhere. Three user groups in Southern Leyte have succeeded in collecting monthly fees to sustain the facilities and are now moving forward to install water meters for individual household connections. In Eastern Samar, three villages joined forces to form a "federated" user group to share the water source from a spring. Their operation and maintenance has led to further sharing with another village, and they are upgrading the system to allow for individual connections.

ADB Transport Specialist Shigehiko Muramoto says, "If somebody teaches them (the women) how to run the water supply system—whether it is the institutional, financial, or the technical aspects—they can do it."

Learn more about the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Sector Project in the Philippines

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