Water is a necessary part of life, as is made abundantly clear every time we are reminded that people are about 60-55% water. As such a vital part of life, wouldn’t it make sense that water should be a fundamental right? The United Nations believes so, and passed Resolution 64/292 on July 28, 2010 stating this belief. To further this resolution, four goals were set by the UN to support access to water worldwide:
- People should receive between 50-100 liters of water a day for basic needs (this is about 13-26 gallons)
- Water cost should not exceed 3% of household income
- The water source should be within 1 km (about 0.6 miles) from home
- The collection time for the water should be within 30 minutes
Setting goals is, of course, not enough to guarantee that everyone has water, and there are several areas worldwide that struggle to provide this necessity. This is a problem of global importance, and involves more than human survival, though that is by far the most pressing concern. Water rights and access to water greatly affect many of the basic human rights of a population, one of which is women’s rights.
You may have noticed that the last two goals listed above involve the distance and the time it takes to retrieve water. These are basic aspects of accessibility, but these goals reach a lot deeper than that. These goals have been put in place partially with the intention to improve the condition of women. Often, in places where there are no pipes or infrastructure to carry water to a population, where people must go out and retrieve the water themselves, the task of collecting the water often falls to the women in the population. The farther away the water supply is, the longer it takes to retrieve the water, and the more time is spent during the day walking back and forth from home to the water supply. This circumstance can leave little time for education. Indeed, this is often a justification for not allowing women to receive schooling, as water is more important to survival. The result? Women are deprived opportunities to advance, and half of a population’s voice is never able to develop.
Take Claris, a girl living in rural Zambia that, at the age of 6 years old, carried a 17 pound container of water back to her house daily. This trip would take hours out of her day and, as the only daughter in the family, was guaranteed to be her duty for life. Her six brothers were able to attend school, though all were stuck drinking the dangerously contaminated water that was their only supply.
These stories are the reason why the UN’s efforts and the work other organizations are doing to make clean drinking water accessible to all are so vastly important for a multitude of reasons. So many basic human rights are tied into water rights, the most important being the right to survive. So, for women’s rights activists, water is just another aspect that needs to be taken into consideration. The fight for access to clean water is the fight for women’s rights in some developing areas of the world, and they are both battles that deserve to be fought for the sake of humanity.