May 2009


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Water Worlds

“If you train the men, you train the men; if you train the women, you train the village,” said Paul Hinds the regional coordinator of Global Water Partnership – Caribbean, at the end of the workshop on Gender, Water and Ecosystem Management held by the Women Gender Water Network (WGWN) at The University of the West Indies (UWI) earlier this month.

He was talking about the realisation that in order for many policies to really take root in communities, the word needs to be spread via the women, because they are the ones carrying the responsibility for much of community life.

The conference was chaired by Dr Fredericka Deare, who said they tried to cover a number of areas.

“The Network (WGWN) has been trying to increase the awareness of water and gender,” she said, and to that end they have been conducting training programmes.

“It is an ongoing process,” she said. “When you say gender, people say WOMEN!” But it doesn’t mean that people are not sensitive to the issues, they don’t always understand how gender differences can affect outcomes.

“So, to me always there is a need to move from research that neglects a gender component. We want gender to be a natural part of research,” she said.

WGWN’s focus is on training, trying to get people to see that there are differences in needs and approaches that are gender-based and they need to be factored in at planning stages.

One of the consultants attending, Jalaludin Khan, agrees and points to how planning processes miss this key element.

“We have a gender-dysfunctional pipeline,” he said.

“At every critical point, gender is absent. We have to do a gender audit, and examine the critical points where gender is important and affects thing,” he said.Niala Maharaj had earlier read a short story she’d written on commission from the Dutch government for the World Summit on Sustainable Development Prepcom III, which though based on an Indian village, was felt to reflect all the concerns of water and community life.

The WGWN, which falls under the Centre for Gender and Development Studies, emerged out of the Nariva Swamp Project—The Nariva Swamp: a Gendered Case Study in Wetland Resource Management—where water was a key variable in the communities life but we felt not adequately addressed in that project.

It was also felt that water in all its complexity was a good theme around which a range of interested scholars, researchers and practitioners, could collaborate from their different disciplinary standpoints. Gender Studies is by definition multi-disciplinary or even trans-disciplinary and the Centre (now the Institute) always sought to collaborate with colleagues in other disciplinary locations in collaborative research. The WGWN works closely with the Global Water Partnership-Caribbean, Caribbean Water- Net and WASA.