WUNRN
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/women-make-change/2015/09/kenya-water-women-150907100720512.html
Website Link Includes Video. Filmmaker: Karin Slater
KENYA WATER WOMEN BUILD TANKS FOR RAINWATER HARVESTING & CLEAN WATER FOR VILLAGES
How Kenya's female water tank masons
are delivering measurable benefits to their communities - and their country.
Across the world, almost 1.2bn
people live in areas where water is physically scarce and this has an enormous
impact on the quality of life.
Without clean water, communities
suffer from recurrent diarrhoea and other debilitating or fatal diseases which,
together with the time spent going to collect it, means a significant amount of
time for education and employment is lost.
Collectively, women in 25
countries in sub-Saharan Africa spend at least 16 million hours each day
collecting drinking water.
So, how could things be
different?
In this film we head to the western Kenyan town
of Kakamega and to the nearby village of
Sisokhe to meet social worker Rose Atieno and Catherine Ondele, a nurse, who are using
rainwater harvesting technology to bring clean water to villages.
To me, water is life. Once you have water in the house then
other things are solved. The time used to get water is reduced. The reduced time
is translated into other development activities. These development activities
within the community entirely changes the country ... So empowering a woman to
me is changing economies. It's giving power. Rose Atieno, social worker
and one of 175 women trained as a tank mason in East Africa.
As Atieno says, the men in rural
villages make the water policies, but it is the women who feel the
"pinch": collecting water is physically difficult, time-consuming,
and can make them vulnerable to rape.
In 2011, Atieno was one of the
women participating in the Global Women's Water Initiative project which
provides women with the skills to build, repair and maintain rainwater
harvesting tanks.
Since then, the trained women
masons have helped other women build new tanks and turn their water into a
money-spinner by selling it to the water company.
We follow Atieno and Ondele to
see how Kenya's female water tank masons are empowering women in rural villages
and bringing measurable benefits to their families, communities - and their
country.
'Kenya's Water Women' can be seen on Al Jazeera English from
September 26 at 2230GMT.