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An Assessment of Effect Rural women's participation in sustainable Rural Water Supply projects in Yemen
Abstract
In rural areas of developing countries, participation of all stakeholders in water supply projects is an important step towards further development. As most of the beneficiaries are usually women, it is especially important to involve them in order to achieve sustainable and successful water supply projects. Women are responsible for management of the water inside and outside their home, and they often spend more than 6 hours daily to fetch drinking water from distant water sources. The problem is that rural women have a weak role in the water supply projects’ phases in rural Yemen. Therefore, this research focuses on analyzing the causes of the lack of women's participation in rural water supply projects, and in what ways women's participation could contribute to sustainable water supply projects in rural mountainous areas in Yemen. Four water supply projects were selected as a case study in Al-Della'a Alaala sub-district in Al-Mahweet governorate. Two of them were implemented by Social Fund and Development (SFD), and the others were implemented by General Authority for Rural Water Supply Projects (GARWSSP). Furthermore, Al-Galba project, which succeeded by involvement of rural women and is located in Badan district in Ibb governorate, was selected for comparison. For this purpose, I carried out a literature review of academic journals, books from Internet websites, international documents, and reports of the GARWSSP and SFD which are related to the four water supply projects, in order to identify the general principles for impact identification and significance determination. The other source for data collection was the opinion of eight Yemeni water experts working in the water sector and academic institutions, in order to investigate their point of view as a specialized group about the reasons for and challenges of the lack of women’s participation. Then face-to-face interviews were carried out with 50 different stakeholders (from a governmental agency, a donor's agency and the local community) in the five water supply projects to find out about their opinion on the criteria for sustainable rural water supply projects and the consequences if rural women are not involved in water supply projects, as well as the barriers for their participation. The potential consequences of active rural women's participation in the water projects are improved continuity, improved maintenance, protected equipment’s, and improvement of the health and education situations in these areas. The majority of the respondents from GARWSSP’ projects estimated that there is no reason to involve women in the project activities. In the comparison project - in which a woman worked as a supervisor and implemented the project – on the other hand, 100% of responders indicated that women’s participation is vital for sustainability. Therefore, the results of this research will hopefully contribute to an improvement of the conditions that are needed to stimulate rural women's participation in the mountainous areas of Yemen.
... Previous studies on the functionality of rural water supply program focus more on factors influencing the community contribution (Boateng and Kendie, 2015;Olajuyigbe, 2016) and/or how community contribution influence the functionality (Al-Mahfadi, 2016;Kasri et al., 2017;Marks et al., 2018Marks et al., , 2014Prokopy, 2004;Wijayanti et al., 2021;Yuerlita, 2017). However, the relative influence or effect of various types of community contribution, e.g., in-cash and inkind, on the functionality of rural water supply systems in developing countries is rarely discussed. ...
... However, we do not say that it is not important to involve women in PAMSIMAS activities. Other studies argue that women's participation is critical for the sustainability of rural water supply (Al-Mahfadi, 2016;Mommen et al., 2017;Yuerlita, 2017). If we analyzed only variables related to women's activities, four variables are significantly associated with the functionality: economic training, health promotion training, O&M training, and proportion of women in BPSPAMS. ...
The influence of the community contributions, such as in-kind, i.e., related to physical contribution in various activities, and in-cash, i.e., cash contribution, on the functionality of the rural water supply program in developing countries is rarely discussed. This study aims to fill that gap by using the 10,789 community-based rural water supply and sanitation programs (PAMSIMAS) data in Indonesia. The in-kind contribution was measured by variables related to some activities conducted before the system was built, while the in-cash contribution was measured by the information related to tariff status, i.e., the monthly water fee. We found that health promotion activity was significantly associated with functionality (OR: 1.03; CI: 1.01–1.05; p ≤ 0.01). The influence of women's participation on functionality is much lower than other types of community contributions. Water supply systems that do not collect water fees from beneficiaries were more likely to be not functioning compared to systems with a tariff system. Moreover, the effect of monthly or regular in-cash or financial contributions on the functionality is significantly larger than all variables related to the in-kind contributions at the beginning of the project, e.g., planning or pipe system construction, with OR values ranging from 1.85 to 3.87 (p ≤ 0.001). This study concludes that a regular financial contribution is necessary to sustain the rural water supply program in developing countries.
This study used multinomial logistic regression and Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) to analyze factors influencing the functionality of the community-based rural drinking water supply and sanitation program (PAMSIMAS) in Indonesia. 28,936 PAMSIMAS projects in 33 provinces in Indonesia were analyzed. The data indicates that 85.4% of the water supply systems were fully functioning, 9.1% were partially functioning, and 5.5% were not functioning. In the regression analysis, good management is positively associated with functionality and a high investment per capita is negatively associated with the functionality. The latter suggests the need for comprehensive economic analysis in the feasibility study in scattered housing sites and remote-undeveloped areas. We also found that high community participation at the beginning of the project was associated with the not functioning system, while women's participation was positively associated with the functionality. Furthermore, the household connection is more likely to be functioning than communal connection. BBN analysis shows if the beneficiaries do not pay for water, the probability of not functioning systems is 20 times higher than systems with fee collection. Moreover, the combination of strong management, strong financial status, and household connection rather than communal connection increases the probability of fully functioning to 98%. Improvement of data collection is also necessary to monitor the current conditions of all PAMSIMAS systems in Indonesia. This study offers a country-level perspective for better implementation of the community-based rural water supply and sanitation program in developing countries.
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