Making Gender Visible in Water and Sanitation Research and Programming
Abstract:
Access to water and sanitation are not only critical to human health, but are also human rights. To date, initiatives have largely focused on increasing access to water sources that ‘have the potential to deliver safe water’ and sanitation facilities that ‘hygienically separate excreta from human contact’. While it is imperative to have safe water and safely managed excreta, these approaches have been too narrow. Water and sanitation are needed for far more than infectious disease prevention. In this talk, Dr. Caruso will discuss how water and sanitation research and programming have ignored the specific needs of women and girls, and, in some cases, have contributed to exploiting them. To enable the audience to think critically about gender in water and sanitation, Dr. Caruso will introduce the World Health Organization framework for assessing gender responsiveness, giving examples of water and sanitation initiatives that are gender harmful as well as those that are gender responsive. She will draw on her own research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, and the WHO, and will highlight simple actions students, researchers, and practitioners can take to ensure their work is gender aware.
About the speaker:
Bethany Caruso is an Assistant Professor in the Hubert Department of Global Health at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. She is a social and behavioral scientist with over a decade of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sectoral research experience in low and middle income settings. She employs mixed methods approaches to understand how compromised WASH conditions impact physical and mental health, behavior, education, and empowerment, with a specific focus on girls and women throughout their life course.
