Eliminating Violence & Poverty
Women Led Water Infrastructure
For organizations engaged in water infrastructure development and women’s empowerment, we are delighted to share resources and insights gained since we trained our first women’s water teams in 2007.
When Global Grassroots first began its work with women survivors of genocide in Rwanda, we were issue agnostic. We focused on what women cared about most in their communities. But quickly we realized there was something about clean water access that involved links to nearly every other issue women were facing in their communities from violence to health to education. Since we trained our first women’s water teams in 2007, we’ve now supported 38 women-led water ventures that are serving 114,000 people in their communities, of which 95% are still operating. For organizations engaged in water infrastructure development around the world, we are delighted to share some of our insights gained from across the years from our women-led teams:
Key Lessons
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There is an explicit and critical link between women’s wellbeing and their access to clean water. Water is both a root of violence and an avenue for empowerment and freedom from abuse for women and girls.
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Women, most proximal to community needs, are often best poised to serve as designers and operators of village water infrastructure, ensuring services to those with greatest need. Water access models that allow a grant-funded (no loan) investment in construction and fee for water sales, ensure operating costs are covered by revenue, while providing women with a sustainable source of income for social change projects.
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Using a Conscious Social Change approach, which encourages the integration of mindfulness, compassion, and participatory solutions, means infrastructure is designed with greater social capital and buy-in from the community, which drives longer-term sustainability.
Key Success Factors
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among self-organized women and girls to lead issue diagnosis and solution development. This is not just about letting women inform the projects driven by industry experts or other leaders. This means partnering with local women who will lead the entire turnkey process with any necessary training and support in project and organizational design, financial budgeting and management, contracting, reporting, and monitoring and evaluation.
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as grants or partial microfinance, and ensure women manage their own funding. Grants can be seen as an investment in deeper social impact ripples. If women do not have to repay significant loans, they can use their more modest profits to reinvest in community needs.
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or further educational and social service interventions. When designed as non-profit enterprises, women are encouraged to explore innovative ways to address complex systems and the range of issues affecting the most marginalized, rather than thinking about their water enterprise as one narrowly-defined enterprise.
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With culturally appropriate metrics and methods to assess progress and prosperity as defined by the people themselves. Measure both internal and external ripple effects. It is not only violence, safety, education, economics, and health that are intertwined with water access, but also personal agency, confidence, well-being, and leadership, which is enhanced by women’s leadership. See more about how we measure impact (link).
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to support personal wellbeing, confidence and agency, deeper and more trusting relationships, more diverse perspectives, and collaborative problem-solving. See more about how inner work fosters social change.
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including clustering women-led ventures, building networks for mentorship and exchange, and engaging in multi-sector partnerships. When more than one women-led venture is operating in proximity to others, it begins to have additional ripples of impact on the community’s confidence in women’s leadership.
Water Access
A Root Cause of Poverty, Violence & Vulnerability
Globally, of the 1.8 billion people who have no access to safe water, women and girls bear the greatest burden for its collection. on average, women and girls travel 6 km/3.7 miles taking up to two hours every day to collect and transport water to their home.
Women-Led Solutions
Maximize Social Impact
Women who manage their own clean water access not only ensure the most vulnerable women and girls are no longer subjected to violence, but when women lead and manage water ventures it provides greater confidence, agency, leadership and engagement in community as change leaders.
Global Grassroots Model
Conscious Social Change
Global Grassroots’s model for women-led water enterprises has involved a two-year program that includes a unique blend of training, high-engagement support, and seed funding.
Integrating Mindfulness
Drives Sustainability
Our unique holistic blend of trauma-healing practices, inner work, and a mindfulness-based social venture incubator, together catalyzes inner and outer transformation.
Call to Action
The link between women and water is clear. Women must be engaged in all aspects of planning, design, implementation and management of water infrastructure. While other NGOs commit to advancing the rights and wellbeing of women, it can serve to make explicit the critical link between women’s wellbeing and opportunity and their access to water. Further, UNWomen in its commitment to advancing women’s wellbeing must consider women’s access to clean water a critical human right that can serve as a potent lever for advancing women’s well-being on many other levels. Finally, global NGOs and environmental agencies committed to protecting clean water must not ignore the vested interests of women, and the knowledge base they represent in terms of the location, quality and reliability of water sources. Engaging women in the solutions-design and management of clean water is essential for long-term community prosperity.