African Climes

One of the global development goals agreed on universally is gender equality. Climate change is an issue of paramount global importance and clean water and sanitation is a human rights issue in many parts of the world. Gender, water and climate change are issues that are inextricably tied together. They are number 5, 6 and 13 of the Sustainable Development Goals.  Women are affected by climate change differently from men. And climate change is primarily felt through water. Most of climate change effects are water related. One of the ways that climate change affects women in the lens of water is in agriculture. A good percentage of the world’s agriculture is small holder, subsistence in nature and done in a rural setup. Majority of farmers in rural areas especially in Africa are women while most of agriculture is rain-fed. It relies on rainfall and precipitation patterns are increasingly being affected by climate change. Droughts, inadequate rainfall and heatwaves cause wate...

Gender is the sum total of the societal roles that come assigned to a given sex. This means that there are implicit and explicit roles and way of life that a person is expected to abide by based on their biological makeup. For example, women are expected to be mothers and wives, home keepers but also career women. Climate change affects everyone on the globe but in different ways and with different intensity. Some people are affected more because of other secondary factors. One of these factors is gender. In terms of gender, women are affected significantly more than men and in unique ways. The effects of climate change manifest as heat waves, intense floods, long droughts, rising sea levels, hurricanes and erratic weather patterns among others. All these affect natural resources in such ways as impacting the availability and quality of water as well as the fertility and ability of soils to produce crop harvests. In the global South and elsewhere in the world, people rely on s...