 Welcome everybody to today's webinar. My name is Leneke Knope. I'm from the water channel and I would like to welcome you at the webinar series in cooperation with IHE Delft. This is the online seminars for alumni and partners in cooperation with the water channel. So a very special welcome to all IHE alumni and partners. And before handing over to the speaker today and introducing you to her, I would like to mention a few things. So we are in this webinar room and we have some options. And the most important thing is the chat books and you will find that in the right bottom corner. In the chat books you can write your name and your organization. So we have an idea of who is actually in this room. And secondly I would like to ask you if you have questions during the presentation you can put them in the same chat books. And then we will start collecting them and after the presentation we will ask the questions one by one to our presenter. So today we are going to talk about why is fetching water considered as a woman's job? And Ms. Neha Mungekar did her research at IHE Delft. She recently graduated and now she will present her findings of this research which she carried out in Zambia. And I was already lucky to see the visuals and they're very beautiful. So I will not say any much further on the content but I would like to say to you that before coming to the Netherlands Ms. Neha has also worked as an urban designer with the World Resources Institute in India. And she is very actively engaged in environmental photojournalism but you will discover that yourself throughout her presentation. So without saying any much further I would like to hand over the floor to Ms. Neha. Thank you everyone. I'm Neha Mungekar and I recently graduated from IHE Delft and thank you so much for making time from your busy schedules from people from different time zones. So before introducing I would like to tell you that six months back I was shifted to this place in Zambia called Kapau and there my research was to understand the role of gender in access to water. To simply put I was trying to know whose job is it to fetch water and job here I was seeing in gender aspects as in who, what and how is it decided the job of fetching water. So I was trying to understand the motivations behind individuals and how is it directly or indirectly affected by social and cultural norms of the society. So the research objective was to examine the role of gender within existing institutional arrangements to access water for domestic consumption. In the presentation I will take you through my concepts and framework then I will introduce you to the case followed by analysis, discussion and conclusion. Let's go back to my objective where I speak about is to examine the role of gender. So gender is colloquially understood as man and women as in sex but it is beyond that. Gender is actually social construction. It is beyond the binary understanding of man and women. It determines the identity, roles and responsibilities defined by the social and cultural norms and embedded through institutions and when I say institutions it does not mean organizations but rules in use such as marriage for that matter. If it is too much let me explain you through example of myself. When you look at me what do you see? You see my sex, you see my nationality, I am an Asian, Indian, my marital status, my ethnicity, my age and in this all through all these attributes all of us imagine me to behave and act in a certain way through the contextual norms of the place and this expectation this thing for me to perform in a certain way is what we call as gender. Let me take you to Zambia to make to further explain you what it means. So let's understand labor divisions as in many in many places it's women's job to fetch water for cooking purposes or for drinking purposes. It's to womenly they say and in livestock or for construction it's to manly. It comes down to like oh it's too much of endurance that's too feminine so these we have these kind of attributes but in reality it's not so. Sometimes it's more or less equal but then we also see few exceptions. If the borewell is too far away the person who owns the ox cart can also go and fetch water. There are also shifting of roles that we see and then when these water users who are enduring certain issues not all of them talk. For example in this picture this is a typical picture what happens in a participatory meeting where men are the one who are deciding and even if there are women do they really speak and if they do who are the one speaking what gives them power and who are the one not speaking and what robs the power out of them. So these are the questions that I had before starting this thesis. So for this research I employed feminist political ecology scholarship. This scholarship helps me understand the social nature of water. It is through this theory that it illuminates the inequalities in water access, collection, use and management at a everyday scale which is micro scale. I understand this theory in five more concepts. Emotionalities. Emotionalities subconsciously control the decisions of an individual to self-discipline and internalize the norms of the society in order to attest a sense of belonging. Followed by I study aspects of care which could simply be nurturing the loved ones or the environment. I also understand the bargaining power which are the inter and intra household negotiations that happens in uncertain institutional arrangements. And these negotiations are between implicit power which are the norms of the society and the explicit power, the power of an individual to override, challenge these norms and this negotiation is what determines the agency of the person. Intersectionality. So I also try to understand how gender intersects with education, age, class and therefore establishing access to the resource in this case water. Access here is understood as ability to derive benefits from things and in my thesis the benefits could be around labor, how it impacts labor and how it impacts voice. So I employed the conceptual framework devised by Cleaver and Hamada which essentially tries to understand the room to manure for an individual in a societal framework. Means the actors which could be individual or group of people with their particular bargaining power or agency, how do they draw, demonstrate societal resources which could be legislation, human capacity, money, their own embedded knowledge through physical and institutional arrangements to draw access through labor and voice. Now, let me take you to the place before going that so my research question that formulates is how are arrangements to water access gender for domestic water use? And I bisected it into three parts. So first is how does access to water for domestic use vary for different individuals? How are the norms and practices to access water gender? And how do gender norms and practices affect the voice of the water users during the decision making process? So going to the place, Zambia. So Zambia is one country with a lot of social, cultural setups, a lot of tribes and this area is a pre-colonial occupation called Barotes land and I studied in Sheshake district. So when I went to the area, I tried to understand the prevailing water concerns in all the villages that you see on the screen. I tried to know what are there any meetings happening in the future so I can participate? What are the norms in place? Things like that. But along with that, I was also seeing my own safety. Do I have a house to stay? Are people talking to me? Can I speak to people? Is there some translation translator available? Where do I sleep? Is there a house? So through these kind of criteria, I finally selected Kapao. So let's try to understand Kapao. Kapao is one hour from the road from Sheshake and one hour more inside the forest. So it's completely away from electricity, infrastructure or even internet or phone network. So it's completely isolated. It has periodic rivers, it has a shallow water table as you can see and it lies in extended Kalahari sand dunes. So in this regard when there is a water shortage, the National Rural Water Supply and Sanitation program has been instituted to drill borewells. So it drills borewells only when the area is highly, it's a power to struck areas and whichever community wants to have a borewell has to send an application. Once the application is sent to a concerned authority, they come there to check the situation. And once it's validated, they drill the borewell and also institute a village committee, which is mandated for the upkeep of the borewell. It's called as VWASHA. So this is the background and this being a qualitative ethnographic study, I wanted to also explain you how did I do it. So gender, as I've told you about the topic, it's more about understanding people's motivations and that's so personal. And to do that, I employed the approach of being there to engage in people's day to day life, to position myself in their life and to understand how things are happening, how people take that certain decision. But this kind of approach is susceptible to many subjectivities. And I was completely aware of that. And when such things are happening, I need to also see what are the subjectivities that I am carrying to the site and how I'm getting influenced as well. So one interesting thing happened. So I'm an Indian, I have my own culture, I have my own habits, I eat with my hand, I prefer eating with my hand. So when I went there, they do eat with their hands. So there was certain kind of similarity between my culture and theirs, but I was also, I was not a Zambian. So I was also different. So I was seen as a known stranger and that took a big place in my interaction with them. And so my thesis was navigating in this blurry space of in-betweenness. And throughout my research, I realized, so whenever you do gender study to understand who is doing what and what should be done in that place, I realize I also did gender. And through my conversation to you, the way I'm talking to you and the way the research happened, it I could I was overlapping the academic interest to my overall social political commitment. And then as many gender scholars, the personal became very political. I started owning this, I started getting affected with what I was seeing, because it was not just me interviewing, it was they also interviewing me and questioning me at the same time. So as a disclaimer, I would say this, the the recommendations of anything are not universal and they shouldn't be. It's very contextual and specific to what happened as a me as a researcher going there and trying to understand the motivations. So how did I collect the data? The data was collected in many types. Of course, the first thing was talking gradual conversations. And I felt I was interviewed more than them. Then I also did I also did the activities to understand what exactly is endured by those water fetches. I observed I participated in the meetings, I extensively wrote journals, I used to sit by the borewell throughout the day and night, writing every activity that's happening around. I'm a documentary photographer myself, I photographed, I, I did visual sociography, I did analytical research on through photo photographs that I took. And the main water fetches, the children themselves, I tried to understand their stories by conducting a drawing competition. And the results were fabulous. It will be coming down in my in my presentation further. So let's go to Kapow and understand their the stories through a story of some individuals. So I will be explaining the story through five people and the sixth character is my borewell herself. So in my story, the two members, Cepiso and George are a couple. And it's the I stayed with them during my entire research. So I actually observed very deeply and minutely. So let's this story, this narrative, I will be explaining through how many buckets of water were procured, whose labor did they use and how was the labor consumed, and how did each of these participants exercise their voice. Let's place, let's understand the area first. So this is Kapow, around 2.5 kilometers. There are three borewells that are drilled. The last one to 2019, which was that was drilled just when I was leaving. So this research is around the two borewells that was drilled in 92 and 2010. When I was situated there and I started moving around, I realized people have this sense of ownership and a neighborhood were forming. The clusters were forming around the borewell water that they used. They actually were demarcated as like that. And so the people that I have the narratives that I'm explaining are situated around this. Also note Marge's house. She's staying beyond this map. So she stays really far. This point will be explained later. So let's start with Annie's story. Annie is a girl of divorced parents. She stays alone with her father. She gets up very early in the morning. Her father is a headmaster. She collects water. She does her household chores, attends the school and then comes home and then goes to Cepiso's house, who is my third character. She goes to her place, plays with her children, cooks, also fetches water for her. And after that is done, she goes and sits at the borewell trying to engage conversation with other women and also helping them to fetch water. By doing this, she's trying to be the part of their society. She's trying to have this kind of acceptance that she's also there. She doesn't want to feel motherless anymore. And throughout the day, instead of collecting five, she actually ends up collecting 11 buckets of water using her own labor. And that takes more than three hours. When I asked her, whom do you tell the issue? Do you feel any issue? And she's like, it's normal. I mean, pain is normal. And if there is any more issue, she tells it to Cepiso. Moving to my second story, Lukas. Lukas is a 12-year-old boy. I met him in school. And he's someone who would be excited to leave early from school as I thought any child would do. But then when I followed him, I realized he has to do this big chore of actually fetch collecting water for livestock. So the farmer who does livestock farming, he goes to the field with the cattle grazing and he comes back. So the canoe which you see on the left has to be filled with water for those animals. Each canoe takes 15 buckets of water. And once it's filled, the animals come and drink. If you do a quick math, we come to know that it takes around one hour to fill that canoe with 15 buckets of water. But is it that simple? Of course not. It's a small 12-year-old boy. The major thing he told me that he gets bullied when he's there. He cannot hold the borewell for one hour. So if some older lady comes with two buckets, he has to shift aside. And with that, and it's not just drilling water. It's also carrying those heavy buckets walking till the canoe. It takes more than four hours a day. That's a lot of time taken. He detested that activity and he preferred to play football instead with his friends. And many times he tries to run away and hides and doesn't want to address his brother who wants him to fetch more water. So here we see Lukas is actually fetching 18 buckets of water and three only bring for the domestic consumption. He uses his own labor and spends more than four hours a day just fetching it. In terms of issues, he only tells his brother. Most of the time he hides from him. Let's go to Cepiso with whom I stayed. Cepiso is wife of George. And George is a very important significant personality. He is a teacher. He speaks English. So Cepiso is known as the very important wife, as the first woman kind of image. So Cepiso with her husband, she does attend meetings but does not speak ever. When I ask her the reason, she says being extrovert is not considered good in this society. But what she does is post-meeting there are the small informal meetings that happens in her courtyard where the discussion takes place. So Cepiso is also someone who has six children out of which three are female and they are the one who fetches water. But that doesn't mean she doesn't go to the borewell. As I said, her husband is a teacher. So that's a traveling job. So she is actually an outsider. So for her to situate herself, to understand the local gossip, she goes and attends the borewell at many times of the day. So she is actually frequenting the borewell more than her children. And most of the household chores is done by the children themselves. So in reality we see Cepiso gets eight buckets of water without her own labor. Is the children that they do. And she doesn't work directly. Any issues she addresses indirectly through her children or through her husband. The fourth individual I want to introduce is Margie. Margie is a widower. She is an old lady and her husband used to be a carpenter. Interestingly she used to be a midwife, a nurse. So because of her job, she would attend to the health needs any time of the day and that would even take her away for 12 hours. The first question, who fetches water in that time? It's her husband. And interestingly the rest of the interviews that I did, any man who would fetch water like this would be ridiculed, would be questioned, oh no what are you doing? It's a women's job. But this guy was allowed because the village said she was doing a noble work. So it's fine if the husband takes that job. So there was this exception. And because she was a nurse, she was also the most empowered lady and women would tell her issues to her and she would voice it in the meetings. Also Margie lived very far. So just one way it would take 20 minutes and so the entire time just to fill one bucket would take one hour. So she only suffices through bucket, two buckets of water. So in this we see Margie uses two buckets of water, takes two hours and she's someone who is very empowered and speaks her mind. The fifth character I would introduce is George. George has a lot of personalities. He's of course is a father and a husband but he's also a teacher, a government employee, a pastor in the local church. He's someone who had a car. He had a lot of avenues of earning money as well. And so he's basically powerful and connected. So and also being knowing English he was someone who would help me translating my interviews. And so he knew what kind of research I was doing. So whenever I would have conversations he would come to me and say yeah yeah I do get it. I am someone, I help my wife, I help my children. So in the narratives he did see that but when I lived with him and I understood he did not do that. He's someone who actually even told me after my dinner don't wash your hands, don't go out. My child will pour water on your hands. So what he did, his behavior was quite contradictory to what he was telling me. And this is where I understood like what he actually believes in and what was the, what were the things that he was following. So in all, so George is someone who depends on two buckets. All of them fetched by his children and he's someone so powerful he speaks his mind and through his various position that gives him power. Now I would like to introduce to the, my favorite character Miss Borewell. When I used to sit throughout the day with my book under a tree, noticing what's happening in the borewell. I don't know if there are Indians who are sitting, who are attending this presentation but I couldn't help but relate the borewell as a banyan tree. The banyan trees are a national tree and when as an urban designer when I used to study I used to find all the village get together, all the important conversations, the reference point of a village, the identity used to be a banyan tree. To the level that the address of the house is, is been said, oh it's third house from the banyan tree, go straight from here and similarly the borewell also took the same position. The second interesting thing what I felt, what I gathered is through my interviews is one of the officers said that people complain to us only when the borewell breaks down and it's the man who comes and tells us and then it's a big problem to find, to diagnose where exactly is the problem and because of the norms they do not speak to women and women do not speak to them and that's actually a sad thing because the borewell does not break down on one day, it break down gradually, it starts making a sound which only people who use it mostly women and children know. So that sound is only known by these people and if they would have said before they would understand it. So that's why I felt like the issues of the borewell are understood by the women, hence for me it's a, it's a female artifact for me. So now going back, so what this table actually tells us? So let's understand through the bargaining power. So I placed a total number of buckets that were collected on the y-axis, then if we see the amount of labor which is consumed, we see Lukas and Annie using highest amount of labor to procuring highest amount of water but in reality that was in the case. We see they use highest amount of labor to procure water for someone else. So here we see Sepiso and George having the highest power who got water without their own labor and Annie and Lukas who got less water but put more labor. Maji was somewhere in the center. This is highly asymmetrical. This is something then I started to probe why is it happening and that's where I started to think it could be gender norms. So that is what I, that is where the gender norms play a role. So they played a role in control of the labor and how it exercise voice. When I say labor it did two things. It made other people work for someone and it made other someone to work for others. So I will basically try to understand the motivations behind people. How did this happen? So when I was there, when I used to live there, I used to attend the mass on Sundays, I used to see how people are answering me. So when I asked the man who collects water in your house and they said women obviously. I said why don't you, do you help them and why do you not if you don't? And they said no it has always been a women's job. In our faith the man's job and women's job are always there. It's instituted and we cannot change it. And that was something that I came through through many, many men. And as I said I use visual ethnography as a tool. So in this I also do analysis while I am on the site. So this was so strong point for me. So when I used to sit in the church and look and as a photographer we generally use this one-third, one-third law in placing the subject. I was trying to click, I was trying to document power in my photographs and it was so evident the power had to go in the center and I use the graphics of propaganda posters to show and the axis has to be on center, the cross could be otherwise. So this is what I felt and moving on to the second element that made people mobilize was the cultural practice. In this part of the world and many other countries, many southern countries in Africa they practice this, the practice of lobola. What it entails is when a man is marrying a woman he pays a token amount of money or in the top, in the form of a currency or in livestock to the women's parents. That is a sign of respect and this is a custom that has been continuing. But to the people whom I interviewed, it has been translated otherwise. It has been told to me by some people that because they have paid the amount they have to the women then have to do those services that they are supposed to do it. Some people even went to an extreme to tell me that the women can't even complain of any backaches or any pain because that will be breaking off the pack because she has been paid to do it. So this has been the translation that has happened in this part of the world. Also practices like kitchen party. This is like a bachelorette that happens before a wedding where the elder women come and tell bride how she should behave, how she should cook, how she should make her husband happy, how should she carry the bucket of water on her head and walk gracefully and this kind of practice it instills, it penetrates through generations and that's how the mobilizing of labor happens. Again it was, this is to be a common view for me where the husband after the field work would sit and then the wife is doing fetching the water throughout the day. Then coming down, so what makes people work for the other one? So mainly it's the children. So female children told me that they love helping their mothers. It instills a sense of responsibility. They feel part of the family if they do and on the other side there were some children who told me they do not like it. It takes away their time. They would play instead and they would read more. So through fear and the sense of duty, the sense of commitment is the reason why the people do it for the other one. Then the reason of distance and time. As we saw from the case that when someone is staying too far, if there are children to help, then it actually reduces the frequency to collect water as we see in this picture. This is a common thing. The fourth aspect that I studied was owning of accessories. When I used to move around, the architect in me couldn't stop to notice the plan of the housing, the habitat. So the central most part was this shed and the field containers were kept and displayed very proudly. And these assets of water is something that everyone take ownership and felt proud about. But interestingly, even the amount of buckets of water you would have, which was the sense of power and sense of pride, it was finally came down to who is fetching it at the end and the women were not that proud about it at the end. So they are the one who is fetching and these many buckets of water. Even in some occasions, some household did have sledges and ox carts. But in that place when I spoke to women and men they said, but they have to take permissions. Even if they have the ox cart does not mean they can use it for to fetch water. So these kind of rules then because of which the labor was mobilized. So moving ahead to the second aspect, how did gender aspects as in the norms affect voice? So why do I understand as what are the concerns that are being said and what are and who is saying those concerns? So what is being conveyed and by whom? So what is being conveyed is against, started in two parts, the customary and administrative structures. The customary structures as I said, the faith and the cultural norms, they make some people internalize the pain. We might have heard this phrase a lot, oh it's a woman's job, oh this is part and parcel of life. Pain is something that we all had to endure. When you repeat this statement again and again, it becomes so internalized that we don't even know that we should be voicing it as an issue. And then the administrative structures in place that acts like a gatekeeper in assigning what is accepted and what is acknowledged concerns. So acknowledged concerns, everyone knows there is a body pain, everyone says the distance is an issue. But then the distance is also very tricky. If someone is staying just 200 meters away, people are like that's not an issue. But then if you are made to walk with 20 kg of buckets on your day every, on your head every day, 20 times a day that the 200 kilometers looks very strenuous. And on the other hand the accepted concerns such as oh the waiting time, the breaking down of the borewell, these are the concerns that are minited, that are table at a meeting, and that are considered worthy to be spoken about. And to understand this more, I use the idea of Chinese whispering as a metaphor. So if you see the main water fetches in Kapao where mainly children and women, so their issues were it's heavy, the sand is too hot, but then it was like okay yeah we understand but it's something we have grown old with it, so no point talking about it. But issues such as pain, queue, waiting time, yeah sometimes it does get gets tabled, but not surely it gets addressed. But something like malfunctioning of borewell, yes that's a technical problem, that should be resolved. So these, this gatekeeping of these issues is what is gendering of the issues. And who is conveying this? So either someone who has an exposure, who has seen the world, who has traveled, has influential spouses, so a wife of an important guy would go and speak, education, can know English, age. Elder women had more say than the younger women, marital status. So in this area, the divorced women were given high respect because the community looked at her as someone who have come out of the situation and number of children. So having more children gave women the time to go and attend meetings and having very younger children like babies could discourage the person, the women to actually attend to because she has to tend to her babies. So these were some reasons because of which the individuals could convey or not. And also the distance and time, it was as I said this place was in this black hole of communication. So no one would know if there is a meeting happening. If they see a SUV coming, then people who have seen an officer then the meeting would happen. Also it's too far away and they would not get the message. The other physical segregation that would happen is if you see in this picture the yellow person is the village chief and the men and the women have to sit separately and I actually walked to understand the distance and it's not audible. So the women only from the front row can actually contribute. The rest of them are just there. So these kind of issues did play a role. So now to go back and going back to the questions. So how does the access to water for domestic use vary for different individuals? So as I said the aspect for me was ability to derive benefits from things and things in my thesis are understood as borewell people and institutions. The relations in between them were gendered and there was and these gendered relationships were constituted between intra and inter-household arrangements and there was this and these arrangements and these relationships were so dynamic that that gave that made me understand the power relations. So the cultural material and political strands of power were part of this bigger web of power that helped me configure and understand and establish access and this situated and dynamic power relations made me understand gender and through narratives of Maji and Lukas we understood how when gender intersects with age leads to different access to water and access in my thesis I understood as buckets, labor and voice and also a sense of belonging. Going to my question too how are the norms and practices to access water gendered? So as we see the the faith, lobola, kitchen party, motherhood these kind of these kind of cultural norms instituted these kind of emotionalities and because of these emotionalities people started doing those jobs but what it really did is it deeply attested internalized form of oppression. And finally to my third question how do the gender norms and practices affect voice? So voice I understand as any attempt at all to change rather than escape from any objectionable state of affairs. For me it meant how does that contribute to change? So it could be you have voice or you're indifferent about it or you are protesting and do not want to contribute. And this could be understood in three scales. Our dominant mother does not necessarily be outspoken in a village because there are so many standards that she has to follow in a village setup. So there is this constant contestation between a personal being a personal figure and a public figure. So as you assign the labor you get this upward mobility in the social ladder therefore empowering that person to speak. So in my thesis what we see is water access is much more to resolve than just water provisioning. And through urban political ecology scholarship you understand the social dynamics of water and the scholarship that I use FPE feminist political ecology it helped me understand this social dynamics at the everyday minute scale helping me answer my question how are arrangements to water access gender for domestic water use. Thank you. Internalize the question. Thank you very much Ms. Neha for this beautiful presentations covering many topics and I have not received any questions in the chat box so far but I do have a question for myself and that might allow others also to start thinking of their own questions or maybe they don't have questions because it was very fascinating to follow all these stories and I can imagine people get also completely absorbed in this but what I want to know is now with the knowledge that you have can you tell us a bit about what can you do with this and how can you then try if wanted to change behavior or to to make a change or a difference. What would be your suggestion? Thank you for this question it's a really good question so I would answer this in many scales is first thing is making gender an important significant agenda because first thing is water should not be seen in isolation as this is a sector to be worked only by the department of water but if you see gender is seen intersecting with water with empowerment with agriculture so all these heads needs to talk together to understand the the access to water and access is not just provisioning secondly if you're doing this work on ground we need to there is this new new thing going on understanding and collecting gender disaggregated disaggregated data so how is how is this data different you know we cannot have universal numbers everywhere and also the motivations these come through qualitative study we need people to go and actually speak and many times it happened and and very rightly pointed by the officers they say they do not have that much logistics to go to each of this village to villages to actually understand what happens and what the women are enduring so there needs to be some kind of more face time happening because the women also need to trust the officer to tell what are the issues and and the thing is the gender norms are not generally a bad thing there's something that instills a sense of belonging to that area so as as someone to find solution you need to navigate it because if that is something by which people feel the sense of belonging you cannot condemn it you have to work towards it so as a recommendation I did recommended for more interactive platforms more more medium through which people start speaking so that acknowledge concern becomes more accepted concerns let's highlight pain why isn't pain something that is not discussed and plated and and and not minuted at all and that becomes a problem why is back issue not something that water department is addressing who addresses back issues in water so these are the question that needs to be asked and addressed yeah thank you very much for this answer in the meantime we have a question from Satvika I've left I'll copy it in the box so everybody can see is it a bit larger so the question is what is the nature of ownership of the poor well is it government owned community owned or privately owned do you feel ownership you changed the power dynamics and access to water okay so here the government is only helping them drill the borewell so the borewell is finally owned by the people themselves so that's why after the drilling of the borewell the government helps them to formulate a committee for the upkeep of the borewell so it's completely owned by the the community it's this is in a way good because that's how the sense of ownership comes in but what it has does it it's only a one-way thing it's only drilled and then it's okay the job is done because we have given you the water they have the thing is it's only done only a borewell has been done the water from the borewell to the house goes through someone's labor and that's not being discussed so yeah the board the ownership is right now community which is fine but then it's not the the I would say the the department that's doing it's not their own their only owners there are other departments that also has to do it so it needs to be like a collective approach of building any infrastructure because any infrastructure that is built it it actually creates reverberates this entire cultural frequency in the in the society thank you for answering this question next question is from Mekli Berihon-Melesa and she asks how does age play in terms of gender is the issue of gender not as significant at younger age like the little boy flexing water so what's the difference between age I wish I would have shown you drawings what the children had drawn so what happened is when gender intersects with age and also in there there is this sense of obedience that we see so the children couldn't did not actually complain you know they have they have to do it as a sense of duty versus if you see old women or old men doing it you know people actually give them way they can break cues so this is how the access to water directly would get affected and in one of the drawings one child actually told me that it's a 20 kg of of a can that he has to hold on his shoulder or on his head and that can is half of his height and when he's holding that can and walking and if a snake comes under his feet he can't do anything because the water would spill so that is what it becomes and if that water gets spilled then he again has to go back and he doesn't get water he or she does not get water just by standing there because again they get bullied and the elder people have more advantage of cutting the cube so that takes more of the time so therefore it affects differently as how young or old you are and also not just children and old people but also the the younger women and the older women the new new brides and the mother-in-law so there is this different kind of dynamics and therefore different how it affects a fetching of water and also the voice who can speak none of the children were part of any of the participatory meetings and no one represented them all the drawings that I had when I showed it to the to some of the people they were like yeah that's normal so you know that was not even considered as an issue to be discussed so this is what I meant like the age plays a very very big role in the termining gender thank you next question is from and he or she says thank you Anaya did lack of information and awareness on what your issues in your case play a role in access of water um I wouldn't say it was lack of information or awareness because I'm trying to understand information as in I did have I did I did do secondary data analysis so I did have information are you trying to understand through my approach so if it's through my approach then being an Indian doing this study played a very good role because it helped me see issues in a through a foreign eye but not that foreign enough that I could slip it so because I would for example when people spoke of bright prize and Lobola it was something I could relate in through the dowry custom that we have back in India so I was just trying to draw the parallels and how it affected water so I did have a kind of in-betweenness to to compare both the cultures so that actually worked for me so and also you know there are so many times when you actually if I would have done this research in my home country I would have missed many of the nuances because I would have taken it for granted because I do it myself and none of these cultural norms directly connects to water till you start inquiring it so me being an Indian going in a different context did help and yeah I did have data available I did have connections to all the local authority I did sit in those office and also took my interview so that what I had thank you if the person who asked this question wants some more information please let us know through the chat box also then the following question Maria Alvarenga first thanks you for the nice presentation when you were in the field did you register and your position of the women regarding this structure the ones that do not speak of commonly did they complain openly to you maybe or do they accept it yes they did they came and told me so many examples of how they were shushed not just them even the officers from the governments that who go and who who are trying to have more female participation when they go and ask they are even they are shushed by the elder women like do not speak you know that's not something you do that happens and even as an outsider you cannot probe them oh no you have to speak that doesn't so yeah so not letting people speak not letting women speak does happen and many women also told me that if they speak later after the meeting they are questioned by the elders like how could you and another aspect which I came across is I asked people why people don't speak and they said oh because they don't have ideas so if they don't have ideas why should they speak so that also happens like the people women also get constantly humiliated for making points and many times they are rebuked by asking some questions and um a bit related um I was picking out don't worry ask were there women represented on the bottle committee and did you have an impression of how influential they were if they were in that committee this is a very good question and this was also part of my one of the these question that I was inquiring this is very tricky so what happened is I went and asked every person whom I was talking to what is who what is the organizational structure of that borewell committee and every person gave me different answers and during the meeting I also saw the members there so there was an official member list and there were there was something that people imagined and and wanted and and thought that's the the borewell structure and the second question I followed it up is so what is the role of each of this member and that was this heartening because they said the decision maker the secretary all these major roles are of men and all the vice post like vice secretary vice this so those were women and then I said okay so what do they have to do in the borewell committee so they said the men have to minute the meeting they have to organize the meeting and the women have to clean the borewells so it was that different and there were some women in the borewell committee but then other than telling the other women informing them about the meetings they did not have such a pivotal prime role in in the committee so of course so having just a committee did not help because the roles and what would they do in that committee would be deeply affected by the gender norms themselves thank you for explaining that another question you've already touched it a bit and ask what is the similarity of your research work with the Indian scenario you already explained and how it will be different because you would not come extra things being Indian could you explain a bit more yes not just Indian but many scenarios also when this when this webinar was advertised I also received a question from Philippines which said fetching water is a man's job so there fetching water is considered very manly and something which a man does so these are gender norms and any any sex any gender any biology that affects it's that that finally manifests to a gender norms and that needs to be studied in India we not just have the issue through sex but also through caste when caste intersects with gender it has more unequal access to water and that is seen widely in across the India we see how the lower caste people the untouchables and we have who should use which water and that plays a role so even if you even as a as a local bureaucrat if you provide water it does not reach to all the end water users and it's not just in villages in India it's also in the cities so if you belong to certain religion and if if the the main elected representative is representing that religion so that community would get more water than than other it happens even in the cities of Bombay so gender intersects with religion with caste and that leads to unequal access and this needs to be studied and brought ahead and therefore there needs to be gender experts in the team in the in the in the water department to help people understand this unequal access of water thank you I think we have we are going to the last question I know asks in your opinion do you see space for change and what would be its acceptance by the community so then we're talking specifically in the community that you worked with yes and one of the example I will tell you is I did not come up with the idea of bright price the low vola being an issue two women came to me and explicitly said you know what is the problem here it's this so there are this some women who are standing up and saying it out loud and most of the women do not even know that's a problem so the the answer is yes and if you see the recommendations would be like to create these interactive platforms to have conversations right and this is again coming from say a water department so therefore we need more interdisciplinary approaches to create these different ways to to answer access to resolve access so providing water does not solve water issues it's something more and bigger and there is a need for it and if you see all the photographs and the stories I've been told by each of this person please take our story ahead please tell it to the world no one comes and studies this problem in this part so that is something I'm trying to do and if if there are more different ways of doing maybe sports activities we women feel so empowered I attended I was there during Christmas celebrations and entire celebration through church all the activities were hosted by the women themselves so it's not like they don't have power those things yes women can do it on their own but when it comes to participatory forums of meetings taking decisions for water it goes to men so this these ideologies need a little bit of shifting we need to understand that men and women both can work together so yes there is a scope for it and we need different mediums to address it thank you for answering that question and related to that I just want to put your links up here where you are explaining more on your story and where people can read more but I also see that we have a bit of time so I would like to give the opportunity to some new questions that just entered the jet books one related to the last question where we were talking about change is a question asked by Mochit I'll put it up and where she asks based on your experience what would be your recommendations to the local organizations or government bodies to deal with the issues regarding access to water okay I have I think touched this part little before but I'll again say it so A if you see there was this V wash and team already set up so the program that provides water there's also something called as D wash it district water sanitation education and health committee so it's a multi-disciplinary program that goes and makes water access possible but that doesn't happen on ground because lack of logistics these departments do not talk to each other so imagine there is a a women's department community development department that goes and addresses issues around gender then there is agriculture department that goes and understands issues around water for agriculture and then there is a water department that is understanding the issues in domestic water use and then these people are making trips twice a year so the thing is if all these people would sit together and actually understand you would actually do say eight trips in a year and those issues won't even be different so these people even don't have to spend time differently so first thing is having a common table and a more multi-disciplinary way of approaching would be something and it's already there in the program so all you need to do it is implement it so the it's more better management of the resources that could be a thing yeah and then the last question why forward more bit did you encounter any issues of sexual exploitation these hardships women face in my thesis no in my particularly for Zambia and for my work I did not encounter anything but through my literature review and through my case studies of other other parts even in Africa there are these issues of water for sex where women have to and have to go ahead with sexual encounters just to be available water that has happened in many remote parts of Africa and that is seen and that and unfortunately what happens with those studies is there is not enough sample size you do not expect 100 women to come and tell you this you just need one women or you just need to just understand that there is something happening and we need to address it quite quickly so yes that is a prevailing concern but not in the place where I was but it's happening with that I would really like to thank you very much on all the questions that you have answered and for the beautiful presentation that you gave and I would like to tell the audience that the recording will be placed on a thing that's already shared at IHE and also on the waterchannel.tv slash webinars and we will also put out the links to the places where Neha is publishing all her stories and last but not least I would like to thank you for all the attention and I would like to mention that there is another webinar coming up on July 4th and that will be with Professor Rufing he is Professor in Coastal Engineering and Port Development and the topics and announcements will be done through the usual channels so thank you very much for your participation and thank you very much for your presentation thank you