Water Women of Africa

Following from my previous post on the DWSS master-plan project in Cameroon to drastically improve rural access to safe water, another parallel major aim was targeted towards sanitation. The project seeks to increase sanitation access rates from 15% to 60%, with plans to service almost 750,000 rural inhabitants. However, whilst DWSS is focused on rural communities, urban sanitation in Cameroon still stands at 17%. This ultimately sheds light on the large development gap in sanitation despite greater infrastructural progress in Cameroon. In fact, access to sanitation regressed from 1990 through to 2008 and thus not meeting the sanitation Millennium Development Goal. This may be explained as Cameroon's infrastructure, like in many African urban areas face the challenges of meeting vastly expanding populations ( Davis, 2006 ). Hence, due to ill-equipped water infrastructure of maintenance and rehabilitation, sewage systems remain blocked, leading to the reliance on traditional slab/...

  Welcome back! As I've highlighted through previous posts, safe water access presents a massive challenge shaped both by physical and human landscapes in Sub-Saharan Africa. But today, let's magnify the human factor of water management, particularly community water management projects taking place. This blog post will delve into the Rural Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Project (DWSS) designed to cover four regions in Cameroon: the West, North West, South West and Southern areas. In doing so, gender connotations specifically embedded into this project will be explored to assess the project's achievement, signalling the growing concern and need for women participation in safe water distribution and sanitation improvements.  Communities or Authorities?   Community water schemes have long operated to provide water infrastructure and services for rural populations in Cameroon. In previous decades, Cameroon underwent historical protest and campaigning events to rule out ...