Work Package 2 explores the lived experiences and practices of sanitation users and providers, documenting how women and men, and girls and boys, step in to tackle infrastructural failures and deliver adequate services. This includes off-grid sanitation users in low income urban communities, and important public sanitation spaces (such as city markets), as well as providers dealing with the construction, maintenance, and repair of sanitation infrastructures, and those who act both as sanitation users and providers in low income households.
Approaching sanitation as situated experience and practice, and taking an intersectional perspective to engage with identities such as gender, age, disability and class, WP2 unpacks the impact of underpinning colonial legacies and postcolonial politics on marginalized urban citizens’ experiences of sanitation, their exposure to engineering deficits, despite the sanitation promises made to them, and their exclusion from infrastructure planning.
OVERDUE Work Package 2
Julian WALKER, Lead WP2
Professor at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL
What are the sanitation experiences and implications for women and men, girls and boys living outside the grid?
Sanitation inequalities have profound consequences when seen from a combined gender, ability, age, and class perspective. Where the alleged ‘urban advantage’ fails to reach children and young people in low income neighbourhoods, it instead turns into a ‘gendered urban (slum) health penalty’. Women and girls are particularly affected by inadequate sanitation, as it turns dealing with menstruations into a struggle, another taboo inside the sanitation taboo. Further, sexual violence jeopardizes their physical safety, and traditional reproductive gender roles make them “responsible” for dealing with health issues ensuing from poor sanitation. With, typically, less political voice, less mobility, less income and fewer entitlements (land, rental contracts), women and girls are likely to face more difficulties at multiple levels to deal with both grid and off-grid sanitation arrangements. Exploring sanitation practices and experiences is a way of understanding how the politics of maldistribution, misrecognition and unequal power produce and reproduce sanitation inequalities, as well as to challenge and transform them.
What and whose practices fund, build, operate, maintain and repair existing grid and off-grid configurations across the sanitation value chain?
Work Package 2 approaches sanitation both from the perspective of situated experiences (what sanitation and for whom) and of situated practices (what type of practices and by whom). Short films and recordings that can travel widely to connect people’s narratives and claims are used to foster new discussions across sanitation chains, institutions, and neighbourhoods, simultaneously questioning issues which remain taboo and tackling entrenched inequalities.
Departing from a scoping analysis based on information gathered through Work Package 1, we build on participant observation, interviews, participatory mapping techniques, and ethnographic methods to:
- Engage with formal and informal collectives of sanitation providers and workers to document their quotidian routines, needs and challenges.
- Engage with Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) committees and similar groups in contrasting informal settlements to co-produce community sanitation profiles, mapping and assessing the functionality of collective sanitation facilities.
- Trace the range of existing off-grid sanitation practices and investment flows deployed by informal dwellers individually and collectively, while assessing the outcomes and implications of such efforts.
- Adopt a relational approach to document the personal and household sanitation trajectories of a diversified set of users across time, facilities, social status and places.
The narratives emerging from the aforementioned approaches generate new conversations across sanitation users and workers and build local capacities to monitor existing facilities, assess needs, cost the investments required to improve and maintain existing sanitation practices and plan new facilities.
Selected publications
- Sanitation Workers Forum (Blog and Videos)
- Work, not duty (Video)
- Le travail invisible des femmes dans le secteur de l’assainissement à Saint Louis Sénégal (Video)
- Sanitation Storage and Distribution (Video)
- La révolte des travailleuses invisibles (Theatre play)
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