Equity

The way women’s issues have been conceptualised and acted on in the context of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) has changed over the past four decades. The discourses and trends in development studies – from the Women in Development approach of the 1970s to Gender and Development in the 1980s – were mirrored in the […]

Globally, 780 million people still do not have access to safe water and 2.5 billion lack improved sanitation. Since its inception, WaterAid has been deeply committed to issues of equity, choosing to work in some of the poorest countries in Africa and Asia, and within these, to work with people who are marginalised. In Tanzania, […]

Legal reform is necessary but not sufficient to realise women’s rights. This paper compares two campaigns for legal reform in Nigeria: attempts to domesticate the UN Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in federal law, which resulted in defeat of the bill in 2007, and a successful campaign to […]

‘Orphans’ became a category of vulnerable children deserving special protection in the context of the global AIDS epidemic, and currently the notion of ‘orphans and vulnerable children’ (OVC), dominates much of the policy for protecting children across sub-Saharan Africa. Analysis of survey and qualitative data from Young Lives in Ethiopia found that parental death does […]

While Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is a relative success in a growing number of countries, there are also difficulties in assuring all community members can build and use toilets. This paper draws on experiences of IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre and its partners in strengthening inclusiveness and sustainability in CLTS interventions. It presents practical […]

The present article provides evidence from a collaborative research programme in Nicaragua that suggests that Fairtrade is falling short of its equity-promoting potential. Providing an alternative framing of Fairtrade based on the gendered social determinants of health, it suggests how Fairtrade can be optimised towards equity. The programme is based on experiences of community-based organisations […]