Everyday practices of poor urban women to access water: Lived realities from a Nairobi slum

ABSTRACT

Women living in low-income areas and informal settlements in the cities regularly have to undergo hardships to access water from overstressed shared water sources in the absence of individual utility piped connections within their premises. Drawing from an ethnographic research in the Mathare slums of Nairobi, this study looks at the ‘daily’ ‘multiple’ and ‘repetitive’ actions that women particularly engage to ‘fetch’, ‘store’ and ‘save’ water for themselves and their families. Besides the woes of finding a running tap and wasting valuable time waiting in the queues, procuring water entails physical hardship that often leads to mental agony that sometimes even threatens the safety and dignity of these women’s lives. Since water supply is frequently interrupted for several days, women struggle to store water, design innovative ways for their families to save water and even cut back on their own water usage at the cost of their health and hygiene to cope with water shortages. Thus, poor urban women experience ‘everyday sufferings from water’ as their everyday choices to access water are restricted by their individual assessment of household water requirements, ownership of assets and their ability to access agencies of power.

KEYWORDS:

• everyday practices
• women
• Nairobi
• slum
• water
• urban poor

Acknowledgements

This article has been prepared from the project ‘Water insecurity among urban poor’ funded by the University Grants Commission, India, under the Research Award Programme 2016–19.

Notes on contributor

Dr Anindita Sarkar is an Indian scholar and Assistant Professor in Geography at Delhi University, Delhi, India.

Notes

1 According to the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) (1997), households with yard taps, private connections and those relying on kiosks respectively spend fifteen, five and 55 minutes per day collecting water. Sumita Gulyani, Debabrata Talukdar, and Mukami Kariuki (2005) estimate households with private connections, yard taps, those using kiosks and those relying on other alternatives, including own and natural sources, respectively spend an average of five, fifteen, 55 and 37 minutes per day on this task.

2 Since piped connections to residences are unreliable, and water supply may be stopped for several weeks, everyone in Mathare depends on community standpipes at some point.

3 In Mathare, 76.3 per cent of the population lives within 50 metres from a water point, and 100 per cent of the population lives within 500 metres of a water point.

4 In Mathare, one standpipe serves 315 people on average (Corburn et al. 2012), whereas the maximum Sphere standard is 250 people. Sphere is a global movement aimed at improving the quality of humanitarian assistance.

5 Household surveys in Kenya report that poor households spend an average of 42 to 45 minutes per day collecting water (Gulyani et al. 2005; WSP 1997).

6 Water-related psychological distress generally develops because of the absence of clear procedures or established water rights (Wutich & Ragsdale 2008).

7 The average capacity of a private water-storage system is about 1 058 litres, and the average investment for such a system is about KSH 5 399 (USD 72).

8 The public lavatories are connected to the main municipal pipeline. When there is no supply from the mains, the public lavatories remain closed.