Water connects every aspect of life. For a large number of the world’s population, access to clean and safe water remains a major challenge. Even as recently as in 2015, at least 844 million people across the world — 12 percent of the global population — were still lacking basic drinking water services. These people still rely on unprotected wells, rivers and springs or take water directly from surface sources.

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Water Crisis situation across the globe:

• Globally, in eight out of 10 households lacking water provision, it is women and girls who bear this responsibility.
• 1 in 9 people lack access to safe water and 1 in 3 people lack access to a toilet.
• “Day Zero,” when at least a million homes in the city of Cape Town, South Africa, will no longer have any running water, was in July.
• 200 million hours women and children spend every day finding and collecting water.
• 266 million hours women and girls spend every day finding a place to go.
• $18.5 Billion economic benefits each year from avoided deaths if there was universal access to basic water and sanitation

Impacts on Women:

• For women, the water crisis is personal. They are responsible for finding a resource their families need to survive – for drinking, cooking, sanitation and hygiene.
• Water scarcity has serious implications on women’s health.
• When schools fail to provide adequate water and sanitation facilities, one of the reasons girls drop out is the difficulty in maintaining menstrual hygiene.
• When their homes do not provide access either, girls and women often limit their water and food intake — forced to spend entire days without relieving themselves or awaiting the privacy that darkness provides.
• When they have to relieve themselves outdoors, they run the risk of contracting diseases like diarrhoea, hepatitis, and cholera which are worsened by under-nutrition.
• Many-a-time, they may be bound by social norms to not venture out of their domestic spaces. They are also vulnerable to sexual assault when they do.
• The World Health Organization recommends 20-50 litres of water per person per day for drinking, cooking and washing. That amounts to hauling between 44 and 110 pounds of water daily for use by each household member.
• Poor women may need to make multiple trips with heavy water pots. The massive number of hours and the labour that these girls and women spend in simply collecting, providing, and managing water for their households/communities distorts their lives, and the labour spent is unaccounted for and
• In Asia and Africa, women walk an average of 6 kilometres (3.7 miles) per day collecting water. Carrying such loads over long distances can result in strained backs, shoulders and necks, and other injuries if women have to walk over uneven and steep terrain or on busy roads.
• In India, water crises usually emerge because access to and control over water is differentiated due to caste, gender, and wealth. Thus, the water crisis is a socially mediated one, with water often flowing uphill to money and power.

Measures needed:

• Access to water is usually linked with unequal social, gender and power relations as well as to distortions in policies, planning and management structures.
• An initiative like Swatch Bharat Mission which aims to build infrastructure for sanitation and drinking water has become bottom-up and people-driven.
• Treating the greywater and reusing it needs to be adopted by countries like Israel (upto 85%). It could be used to recharge depleted aquifers and use on crops.
• Israel has also eliminated water-thirsty crops like cotton and made major improvements in water efficiency to free up more water for population growth.
• Smart, simple and sustainable solutions like Watercredit, rainwater harvesting, watershed development needs to be driven by the policies of the state.
• Technologies capable of converting non-drinkable water into fresh, consumable water, offering a potential solution to the impending water crisis are needed. Example: Desalination technologies in Coastal areas, Water-sterilization in polluted water areas.
• The media has a key role to play in ensuring that conversations and decisions on resources like water include a woman’s perspective.
• Men and women from all walks of life need to be included in such conversations and, more importantly, governments and political leaders should be held to account for this situation.

Conclusion:

The lack of access to water is a violation of poor women and men’s human rights. Pictures of women carrying pots may be beautiful and widespread in popular culture, but it is a crime and outrage in the 21st century. Women are on the front line of the struggle, and improving the lives of the millions of females impacted by poverty will require a colossal international effort.