WOMEN AND THE URBAN SANITATION CHALLENGE: Tracing an intersectional relationship

The global sanitation crisis is one of the most important developmental challenges in the 21st century with 2.4 billion people still lacking access to improved sanitation facilities. Women are particularly affected and the lack of access to safe toilets is accompanied by several risks, shame, health issues, indignity, harassment and attack. Though sanitation is usually perceived as a private act, the lack of a private space forces the action to become a matter of public intervention, i.e. open defecation, leading to the female body not only becoming a site of oppression but also of contestation, negotiations and a socio-political tool within urban infrastructure regimes. Thus, sanitation infrastructure is often determined by engineering, environmental and public health concerns that are often far removed from women's needs, their socio-cultural practices and existing gender constructs. In addition, the failure to involve women in the design of infrastructure facilities results in inappropriate standards and technological artefacts. Furthermore, research about gender and sanitation in African cities focuses mostly on hygiene and health issues but fails to capture the magnitude and scope of gender-based disparities, how women's human rights fit into different development strategies and an inherent lack of gender equality in accessibility of sanitary infrastructure. Therefore, my research claims that there is a need to examine injustice against women through infrastructural inadequacy. In this research, I aim to investigate the inclusion of public infrastructure under the taxonomy of systems of oppression of women through the perspective of urban and infrastructural development issues. I use a techno-feminist perspective to inspect how gender inequality in urban spaces, manifested in the different relations women and men establish with sanitation facilities in informal settlements, could also be seen from the lenses of women ́s ambiguous relation with technology (as users but removed from design). The research presents data obtained through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, participant observations and focus group discussions conducted in March-April 2015 and February-April 2016 with state actors, development agencies, non-governmental organizations and, male and female residents of informal settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. The findings revealed firstly, sanitation infrastructure provision exhibited a technical focus, with a major emphasis on public health concerns in Dar es Salaam whereas the findings from Nairobi presented a more emphasised focus on engineering and technical aspects along with concerns for public health and hygiene. Secondly, fear and insecurity were being imbibed within the women residents of informal settlements who used various coping mechanisms in their everyday encounters with shared/multi-family toilets. Thirdly, the lived experiences of women users contrasted with the imaginaries designed by service providers. In both the cities, all actors involved in service provision showed an imagining of the users and usage of the infrastructure by the designers. The conclusion of the study highlighted that firstly, despite the presence of acts of violence against women intersecting with shared/multi-family toilets, the layer of violence is yet to be addressed within sanitation infrastructure provision. Additionally, themes of reductionism were observed within service provision processes that could be exacerbating the induction of fear and insecurity within the women residents. Furthermore, the women residents’ restricted interaction with the infrastructure highlighted key information that could help bridge some of the gaps in knowledge on socio-spatially relevant sanitation infrastructure. Moreover, evidence from the lived experiences of the women residents highlighted the recurring acts of violence which created a more oppressive environment for them to live in every day, specifically the intersection of violence with inadequate service provision was identified to instigate an oppressive environment around shared sanitation facilities. Therefore, a more detailed analysis into urban infrastructure planning needs to be carried out to determine with certainty if infrastructures are themselves turning into systems of oppression or whether the reported violence is an unintended consequence