Women and water «wahala»: Picturing gendered waterscapes in Southwest Cameroon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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 Personal acknowledgementsIt is difficult to express the extent of my appreciation to the network of people who have supported this study in different ways.To begin, I extend my sincere gratitude to the research participants in Cameroon who participated in this study.Your trust in me as a researcher and willingness to work together was a true honour, for which I am indebted.I hope that I have adequately represented the scope and nature of the concerns that you shared during the research process.I accept responsibility for any errors in the thesis.Changing Mentalities and Empowering Groups (CHAMEG) and Mrs. Magdaline Agbor, in particular, you were the backbone of this study.Meg, your commitment, hope, boundless energy, and ability to make things happen continue to inspire me.I thank you for inviting me so warmly into your organization, your personal and professional networks, and your home in ways that extended beyond what I imagined collaborative research to entail.I would also like to thank the following individuals who played pivotal roles as my cofacilitators during the community-based workshops: Agnes Nanyongo Mediki, Bruno Difang Tahr,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".