Women Water Stewards
Women's Challenges Around the Globe
- Women and girls can sometimes spend all day fetching water
- Water related diseases cost the Indian economy 73 million working days a year
- Lack of sanitation facilities force women and girls to resort to relieving themselves publicly leaving them vulnerable to violent attacks and rape
- A 20-liter (5 gallon) jug of water weighs almost 50lbs
- When water and sanitation facilities are in schools, the number of female students increases. With just a few years of basic education, women have smaller, healthier families, and are more likely able to work their way out of poverty
- Each additional year of female education is thought to reduce child mortality by 5-10%
Transforming Women's Burdens into Opportunities
With the growing concerns of a world plagued with social inequities and environmental degradation, it is crucial for a future of sustainability that we seek guidance and leadership from our natural caretakers: women. By addressing the environmental conditions that create gender inequity, our goal is to find simple solutions that organically create social change providing more opportunities for women to take a leading role in their water resources.
Why women? ASD targets women and women's groups as they are responsible for the health and welfare of the household and have a traditional role in water collection. Our goal is to cultivate and foster active participation of women in water supply development projects. Women and girls are effected most profoundly by lack of access to water. Women and girls are assigned the task of fetching water which can sometimes take all day. Hence, women do not have livelihood opportunities and girls cannot go to school. Lack of sanitation facilities prevent women from relieving themselves in the daytime, girls cannot attend school when they have their periods and these actions put them at risk for violent attacks and rape.
