Over the past months, I have tried to highlight the intersections that gender makes with water and development in Africa. In doing so I feel as though I keep returning to a few critically important points. In my opinion, education is by far the most important factor in removing the negative social norms and taboos that exist in sub-Saharan Africa as a lack of understanding is what has led their society to exist in the way it does today.
Colonialism and its resulting Eurocentric education system has formed the basis of the vast inequality between men and women in Africa. The system was created around promoting male dominance in paid employment, and ultimately governance and decision-making, leading to the belief that women's participation in politics is merely a distraction from household duties.
This marginalisation of women is and their invisibility in decision-making means that it becomes incredibly hard for changes to be made and they remain suppressed. This means that issues such as menstruation will continue to disrupt young girls lives and cause them to miss out on education themselves for example, which creates a negative cycle whereby changes are never made.
Changes in education and an improvement in the provision of resources would allow all children to be sufficiently educated on different matters, allowing for taboos to be removed from society, creating far safer and more productive lives for everyone. Water collection responsibilities and period poverty need to be terms of the past and interventions made in the future need to be paired with work to eradicate socio-cultural norms which for so long have dictated that water is 'women's work.
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