Women and girls often bear primary responsibility for providing drinking water and sanitation within their families and as a result are disproportionately affected when they have to travel to reach these services/facilities and take time to maintain them. Improved sanitation access is crucial to preserving the basic dignity of women and girls and reducing gender-based violence. Essential to this is addressing underlying structural inequalities, which stop women and girls gaining access to water, sanitation and hygiene; these include women’s lack of access to funds and information, exclusion from decision-making in WASH, poorly designed facilities for women and girls along with restrictive gender norms.

This timely issue of USAID’s Water Currents thematic newsletter contains studies and reports from 2017 and 2018 on gender issues related to women-friendly design and location of sanitation and hygiene facilities/services, water security and collection, male participation in sanitation, gender inequalities along the sanitation value chain, Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM), and other topics.

We are very pleased to see a number of CLTS Knowledge Hub Frontiers included in the newsletter along with our recent book on Urban CLTS. 

Many thanks to Dan Campbell for putting this great newsletter together!