Women’s Crucial Role in Collective Operation and Maintenance of Drinking Water Infrastructure in Rural Uganda

ABSTRACT

Operation and maintenance of communally owned water sources in Uganda still pose challenges despite the devolution of water management from the state to user communities. Using a mixed-methods approach and a gender-sensitive collective action analytical framework, this article quantifies the role of women in drinking-water governance and identifies barriers to women’s participation. The findings show that women not only are more willing to contribute but have also stated higher actual contribution than their male counterparts. The article outlines the institutional and individual attributes constraining women’s effective participation in water management and suggests how to enhance women’s participation in water governance. We argue that a strategy built on water users’ collective action in Uganda has to be built on women’s participation through effective rules and monitoring mechanisms, as well as on long-term sensitization and awareness creation on gender stereotypes that hitherto hinder women’s participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective action
• demand-driven approach
• drinking water
• gender relations
• local water governance
• operation and maintenance
• rural Uganda
• willingness to contribute
• women

Notes

Committee elected by users at the community level to oversee operations and maintenance.

These include boreholes, shallow wells, protected springs, and gravity-flow systems.

“Subcounty” is the level below district and is made up of a number of parishes.

“District” is the highest level of the local government administrative structures.

“Village” is the lowest administrative unit, consisting of neighboring households.

In the case when nobody was at home in the ramdomly selected households, the research team would make several visits until they found the interviewee.

Here used as an umbrella term that refers to a package of activities involving awareness raising, community mobilization, postconstruction follow-up, and community support.