Women and Water Wahala Picturing Gendered Waterscapes in Southwest Cameroon

"With gendered divisions of labour, many women play an important role in daily water management. Women therefore have specific experiential knowledge with water and are disproportionately impacted by water access challenges. Yet women's priorities and the gendered nature of water use, access, and control are often overlooked in water policy and research. This bias perpetuates 'gender-neutral' water management strategies and distorts how water problems are addressed. Responding to calls for broader approaches to water governance that include social power, this study explores the gendered politics of the waterscape in Cameroon. Bringing together feminist intersectionality theory and new thinking about the politics and materiality of water, I explore through participatory visual methodologies women's and men's everyday water experiences. In collaboration with a civil society organization, Changing Mentalities and Empowering Groups (CHAMEG), I co-facilitated photovoice and participatory video processes in two urban and two rural communities in Cameroon's Southwest Region involving 130 participants (96 women and 34 men). Participant-produced images and participant-led analysis emphasize women's daily problems or troubles (wahala in Pidgin English) with water. Despite an abundance of freshwater available in the vicinity of Mount Cameroon, the services from both partially privatized and community-managed water supply networks tend to be unreliable. Multiple alternative sources such as wells, springs, and streams provide resilience for communities to fulfill their daily water needs. Yet these alternatives also present gendered concerns about, for example, the embodied and emotional labour related to searching for water, sexual and gender-based violence, intra-household dynamics, and the technologies of water access, storage, and treatment. Participants also identified the gendered nature of planning and sanitation in relation to water quality, source protection, and sustainability. A discussion forum with local decision-makers provided an opportunity to interrogate the implications of the research for local change, which highlighted the politics of participation, community, authority, and water decision-making. In applying an intersectional lens that attends to social difference and the complexity of gender, the materiality of water and water infrastructure also emerged as critical factors influencing experience. I suggest that these interconnections between the social and the material have implications for intersectionality theory. Offering a deconstruction of the theory, I propose four analytic tools for looking at intersectionality: Simultaneity, situated specificity, relationality, and fluid consistencies. These tools or mechanisms help to widen the analytical frame of intersectional thinking to include the mutual entanglements between gendered social relations of power and the materiality of water. The thesis contributes to the areas of gender and development in Cameroon, participation in water governance, feminist intersectionality theory, and the use of visual methodologies for water research." --