Water is Life: Women’s human rights in national and local water governance in Southern and Eastern Africa | Land Portal

Informations sur la ressource

Date of publication: 
décembre 2015
Resource Language: 
ISBN / Resource ID: 
mokoro:8139

This book approaches water and sanitation as an African gender and human rights issue. Empirical case studies from Kenya, Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe show how coexisting international, national and local regulations of water and sanitation respond to the ways in which different groups of rural and urban women gain access to water for personal, domestic and livelihood purposes. Explores how women cope in contexts where they lack secure rights, and participation in water governance institutions, formal and informal. Shows how women – as producers of family food – rely on water from multiple sources that are governed by community based norms and institutions which recognize the right to water for livelihood. How these ‘common pool water resources’ are threatened by large-scale development and commercialization initiatives is a key concern. Demonstrates that existing water governance structures lack mechanisms which make them accountable to poor and vulnerable waters users on the ground, most importantly women. Underscores the need to intensify measures to hold states accountable, not just in water services provision, but in assuring the basic human right to clean drinking water and sanitation; and also to protect water for livelihoods.

Auteurs et éditeurs

Author(s), editor(s), contributor(s): 

Anne Hellum
Patricia Kameri
Barbara van Koppen

Publisher(s): 

Weaver Press is a dynamic independent publishing house formed in 1998 to publish books from and about Zimbabwe.

Weaver’s growing fiction list now features over 120 Zimbabwean short story writers, and our novelists include several international prize-winners who were first published by Weaver Press. Our non-fiction list focuses on political and social history, the environment, media issues, and women and children’s rights; it features many esteemed scholars from inside and outside Zimbabwe whose work looks at Zimbabwe’s developments from a wide range of viewpoints.

Fournisseur de données

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Mokoro is pleased to host the ’Land Rights in Africa’ site as a contribution to the land rights dialogue and related debates. This website was created in January 2000 by Robin Palmer, and was originally housed by Oxfam GB, where Robin worked as a Land Rights Adviser. A library of resources on land rights in Africa – with a particular focus on women’s land rights and on the impact of land grabbing in Africa – the portal has been well received by practitioners, researchers and policy makers, and has grown considerably over the years.

Concentration géographique

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