Today is World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, which is the theme for this year “Woman. Your country. Your rights” Uncover gender disparities in rural areas that could deepen as droughts intensify and desertification progresses. The Latin American Association for Desalination and Water Reuse (ALADYR) participated in providing an overview of the situation in Latin America and proposed suggested solutions for the solution.
About 20% of the Latin American population lives in rural areas, where the economy is mainly based on agriculture. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), women make up 48% of this segment, at more than 58 million.
“The field is already particularly difficult and unfair for women,” says ALADYR and data from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) confirms this, ensuring that their remuneration for such tasks is 40% lower than that of men and women so often suffer from overwork without having an income of their own.
For the Latin American association, the lack of water is always an aggravating factor for social injustice and precarious conditions. According to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), if the liquid does not reach the house, 72% of the time it’s a woman or girl who has to look for it.
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“Imagine losing your chance to improve your education and have a better future because you have to walk miles most of your day to fetch water in heavy buckets on your head. Literally, water shortages are weighing more on women’s heads, and the droughts looming across Latin America threaten to exacerbate this situation, which is a daily ailment in places like La Guajira in Colombia or the north-eastern region of Brazil,” says she. Angelica RiveraDirector of ALADYR.
Likewise, in countries where managing sanitation and access to drinking water requires greater effort and investment, such as Mexico, Venezuela and Uruguay, it is usually a woman who must solve domestic problems to gain access to this precious resource. Filling buckets and pails, awareness of water outages and service disruptions becomes part of household routine and influences decisions to go to work/school or fetch water.
Faced with this problem, ALADYR proposes solutions such as desalination, a technology that makes it possible to obtain drinking water from seawater and brackish water wells. This technology offers a sustainable alternative to increasing water availability in dry areas and addressing water scarcity in rural communities, as is being successfully implemented in Brazil with the Água Doce program.
Likewise, implementing water reuse systems that utilize existing water, treat and recycle wastewater for use in agricultural, industrial, and urban activities can help relieve pressure on natural water resources and fill the supply gaps.
Rivera emphasizes the importance of these solutions: “Desalination and water reuse are fundamental tools to make room for the desert and ensure a sustainable water supply. These technologies benefit everyone, but if we focus on the motto we are addressing this year, it is fair to say that they can particularly benefit women in rural communities by giving them access to drinking water and water resources for enabling the development of agricultural and economic activities. It literally has the potential to free women from the burden of fetching water.”
It should be noted that unless these forecasts are accompanied by public action on gender inclusion in field relief programs, the region will face social drama that will be more difficult to reverse as meteorological, agronomic and hydrological droughts worsen (decrease). precipitation, soil moisture or runoff) forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report, which provides a high degree of certainty that Central and South America are regions that are “highly exposed, vulnerable and severely affected by climate change”.
The tools at your disposal
Water scarcity and desertification are disproportionately affecting rural communities and exacerbating gender inequalities in the Latin American region. However, desalination and water reuse technologies offer concrete solutions to ensure constant access to drinking water and make room for the desert. What is it made of?
Desalination makes it possible to make seawater or brackish water from wells drinkable. This is a particularly relevant technology in coastal areas where freshwater scarcity is more pressing. By providing an additional source, desalination can help mitigate the effects of drought and provide access to clean water for crops, crops and sanitation, benefiting communities at large and closing the gender gap.
On the other hand, water reuse is presented as a sustainable alternative to ensure constant water supply in various activities. The treatment and recycling of waste water avoids waste and uses valuable resources that can be fed back into a production and service chain. Its approach is that of the circular economy of water and its agricultural application is safe and a growing trend.
In addition, timely and sustainable irrigation practices, such as drip irrigation using water from desalination or reuse, play a critical role in restoring plant landscapes. These practices have allowed land in arid areas to be revalued in Saudi Arabia as well as in Chile and Mexico.
More Latin American inequalities
For its part, the FAO also points out that while women work the land in the same way as men, only 18% of regional farms are run by women and that they receive only 10% of the credit and 5% of the support technology for the sector, demonstrating a failure of the public policies in support of this area.
Another disproportionality pointed out by FAO is that land ownership by women in the region ranges from 7.8% in Guatemala to 30.8% in Peru, and they tend to be less suitable for agropastoral production as land owned by men.
ALADYR makes itself available to the authorities to accompany them in the design of policies and strategic plans for water procurement in the most vulnerable sectors, emphasizing that this shortage caused by the drought is affecting important cities such as Lima, São Paulo and Santiago Otherwise, forecasts are made to strengthen the water supply systems.
“Women’s empowerment is about creating development opportunities even in the most remote places like the Latin American deserts, and decentralized technical solutions already exist for this,” concludes Rivera.
Q2: Searching for water limits employment and education opportunities for women – Photo Government of Mexico