Workshop Reports

Here you find the reports on the working groups by the GWA gender ambassadors after the Asian consultative workshop.

ADB Workshop on Water and Poverty: "Thus, could they speak to how poor women and men were being engaged in policy making and in the implementation of water programmes. There was general agreement on this. However, in their presentations no country addressed how a gender analysis was informing either policy or practice". Report by Prabha Khosla during the ADB Workshop on Water and Poverty, September 22-26, 2002, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Capacity Building and Empowerment: The discussion was initiated by recognition of the changed context in which there was a change of role of the state from that of a provider to that of a facilitator. This raised the issue of greater reliance of communities on their own abilities to develop according to their own priorities.
Disaster Prevention and Disaster Mitigation and Water: Within the above-described mindset, gender mainstreaming is virtually impossible. As a first step, it needs to be recognised that disasters, vulnerability, and coping capacity are closely linked and that disaster mitigation needs to start at the lowest affected levels. This has been my first objective during the workshop and this has been achieved to some extent. The need for gender sensitive impact assessments and approaches has been stressed, however, these issues were merely accepted, as it considered to political incorrect to argue against it.
Impacts of Gender Mainstreaming of the GWA: This was most helpful in getting a better understanding of the concept and the inter-relationship between women and men thus emphasising gender as the concept, which is about women and men and not women in isolation
Improved Access to quality services: The presentation established food security as the means of tackling the food supply situation and also stated that the world produces enough food, but not everyone had access to this food. Causes of food insecurity among the poor included lack of access to means of production (land and water) to produce food, lack of resources to buy food and inappropriate distribution of food.
Management of Environment: Some of the issues identified were health of the ecosystem, conflict resolution on water, habitat management and bio-diversity, etc. The facilitator then asked the group to raise additional issues and elaborate on the same.
Pro-Poor Water Governance: Water governance refers to the political, economic, social and administrative that are in place to develop and manage water resources and the delivery of water services at different levels of society (GWP definition).
Some findings of the workshop: The first essential condition for success is that there has to be concerted political will to make changes to water management. Improving access of the poor to water resources may challenge the interests of powerful vested groups who benefit from existing forms of management and it may require substantial investments of money, institutional capacities and other resources that have to be diverted from other areas.