In Kenya's arid northwest, women's rights grows with water

Deborah Katina of Yang'at, a CWS partner in West Pokot, Kenya

Photo: T. Abraham/CWS

July 30, 2007

Access to water is one key to women's rights.

That is the lesson learned by Yang'at, a Church World Service partner in Kenya's arid northwest. And that is the message that Yang'at coordinator Deborah Katina brings to her work in communities in West Pokot as her organization empowers women by improving access to water.

Katina visited the U.S. for the first time last month and described how Yang'at ("to care") is helping women to become leaders in their communities.

Yang'at is also advocating for community ownership of water resources and better engagement with local government, following principles of the CWS Water for All campaign. The campaign links local projects to a global network, ensuring that communities and their perspectives inform national policies on water.

In West Pokot, women walk long distances to collect water, sometimes as much as 12 miles. One woman told Katina she left at three in the morning, in order to be back at her home by 8am to fix porridge for her family's breakfast.

The burden of collecting water and other difficult manual labor is made heavier by cultural attitudes that place a low value on female education. Girls are genitally mutilated and married off around the age of 12 to older men in exchange for 30 or 40 cows. These traditional practices, which doom many West Pokot women to a life of hard labor, effectually shut the door on any means of improvement in their economic status.

With funding from CWS, and the active participation of the communities it serves, Yang'at built six subsurface dams along seasonal rivers close to several communities in West Pokot in the last two years. These dams trap water-logged sand during the short rainy season. Without the sand dams, the runoff usually evaporates in the scorching equatorial sun.

Women are able to walk a fraction of the distance they normally trudge for water, dig into the river bed and access the subsurface water. In times of severe shortage, a pipe at the bottom of the dam bed also gives access to deeper water.

The projects are carried out with local materials, using community labor -- and in cooperation with the Kenyan government's Ministry of Water.

"Under the Water Act in our country all the water belongs to the government," says Katina. "The community has to get permits for the projects and register with the government." A project to tap mountains springs and bring water to the lowlands via pipeline (gravity-fed) was carried out in cooperation with the Arm of Arid Lands in the Office of the President.

Katina points to a change in relations between communities and the government over water. Previously, projects to supply water were undertaken by the government, with little community ownership. Equipment failures were left untended because the community looked to the government to fix them.

"The policy is changing," said Katina. "The government wants communities to own the projects. The government has set up Boards, each responsible for a part of the country. Each Board looks for organizations like Yang'at. The Municipality runs the projects, employing people from government to keep an eye on them."