International Women's Day: March 8, 2009
Print
EmailInternational Women’s Day (IWD) is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present, and future. Official IWD site.
To celebrate International Women’s Day 2009, we take a look at some gender impacts of output-based aid projects.
Water and Sanitation
GPOBA water and sanitation projects are using output-based aid approaches to improve access to safe drinking water and sanitation services for poor households. This can be through individual households connections or public access points.
Access to drinking water and improved sanitation closer to the home helps to reduce the time women and girls spend on such activities, which can be as much as six hours per day in some areas.
For example, in a water project in Cameroon funded by GPOBA, individual household connections to the water network will create time savings for women and children in poor neighborhoods.
This will allow them to participate in more productive activities, thus promoting gender equality and empowerment of women.
Improved access to safe drinking water also leads to improvements in health. For instance, using clean water reduces infections that mainly affect children, such as eye infections and the infections of the digestive system that cause diarrhea.
As women are the primary care-givers in the home, this also improves their health, as they are less exposed to infections carried by family members.
An example is the GPOBA-funded water project in Mozambique which is increasing piped-water access for poor households in urban areas, thus helping to reduce disease and death related to water-borne illnesses.
Energy
Output-based aid projects in the energy sector aim to provide households with clean and sustainable energy for heating, cooking or light.
Projects for heating and cooking generally replace the use of firewood. This can free time for women to participate in economic activities and for girls to dedicate to primary education.
For example, women and girls, who are traditionally responsible for collecting firewood and cooking, are among the primary beneficiaries of a GPOBA-funded biogas support program in Nepal.
Replacing wood or coal-fired heating or cooking stoves with natural gas or biogas also reduces the exposure of women and children to indoor air pollution, a major cause of respiratory infections.
Improved lighting can enable children, particularly girls who are often needed during the daylight hours to help their families, to study and do their homework.
Access to energy also increases the productivity of businesses and contributes to economic growth. Household access to energy helps women with home businesses to improve their livelihood.
For instance, a solar home system project in Bolivia is creating more flexibility for women to schedule their income earning and domestic activities, due to the possibility of extending work into the evening hours.
Health
GPOBA health projects, such as safe childbirth projects, use output-based aid approaches to address gender-related health risks.
Safe childbirth projects significantly reduce maternal mortality and disability related to pregnancy and child delivery. Such interventions also reduce child mortality, thus contributing to a decrease in fertility rates.
For example, a GPOBA-funded safe motherhood project in Yemen will improve maternal health by providing a “Mother-Baby package” of essential good quality health services to women in some of the poorest districts of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a.
In some places cultural norms prevent women from seeking medical treatment. This may be the case where medical practitioners are mostly male and it is considered inappropriate for men to treat women. In such cases women may be forced to use untrained traditional healers.
Output-based aid schemes can encourage service providers, who are partially paid on the number of patients treated, to come up with creative solutions to adapt service provision to women’s needs.
For instance, in a health contracting scheme in Afghanistan, funded by the World Bank, the service provider hired nurses from a neighboring country, thus significantly increasing the women’s access to healthcare.
ICT
GPOBA Information and Communications Technology (ICT) projects mainly extend the reach of rural cellular telephony to poorer and more remote areas.
An example is the GPOBA-supported Cambodia rural telecom project, which will increase access to telephone services for people living in remote rural villages.
Telephones can give women whose lives are based around the home a link to the outside world.
They can also enable women in rural areas to get medical help, for example during childbirth, either by having a medical professional visit the household or by receiving remote medical advice.
In some cases, GPOBA ICT projects also provide remote villages with access to the internet by setting up internet kiosks.
Girls and women can use the internet to access health information, particularly information on reproductive health that is not available through traditional channels.
As output-based aid projects are demand-driven, service providers have an incentive to address the needs of their female customers, for example by adapting opening hours of telecenters.
Telecenters can also support women’s economic activities. Women can find information on the web that will help them improve the production process and product design.