I'm gonna go ahead and start now.
Okay, we are gonna get started. Hello everybody!
I'm Dr. Maria Elisa Christie. I'm Director of women and gender in International Development
at the Center for international research, education,and development and first of all
I have to say I'm very excited we're here in person for the first time since February 2020.
As our first in-person event it is hybrid so we have a lot of people on Zoom. Hello Johanna!
um so Lumbini Barua is my graduate assistant and she's supporting the discussion series online even
though she's in a conference in South Carolina. So thank you to Lumbini! And then Jess Spence
who's a Ph.D. student here as well at ALCE, she'll be our next speaker and she's here also
for technical support. So welcome to the hybrid women and gender development discussion series.
So Emily's visit to Virginia Tech this week is co-sponsored by the Department of
political science, The planning, governance, and globalization Ph.D. program which she's a graduate
of, the School of public and international Affairs better known as SPIA, Africana studies,
and the Virginia Water Resources Research Center. I'm very grateful for their support.
So please note that our event will be recorded and will be available on our website a week or
so after this event as well as our previous discussion Series speakers. So if you don't
want to be recorded and you're on Zoom just turn your camera off um if you don't want your
image recorded. So as of this morning we had 75 people registered most of those are Zoom.
20 were registered for in person, 48 were Virginia Tech but in addition to many diverse folks in the
United States, we have people from eight other countries registering as coming in from Benin,
Eswatini, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, and the UK. So welcome to everybody!
The full calendar and updates for this year's discussion series is available on our website
on the CIRED website. So you know I have to ask um given the events of this week,
the earthquake in uh Monday I'd like to ask for a moment of silence for
over 17,500 victims.
Okay next I would like to read um a short version of the land and labor recognition
um Virginia Tech acknowledges that we live and work on the Tutelo/Monacan and people's Homeland.
We recognize their continued relationships with their lands and waterways. We further acknowledge
that the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 enabled the Commonwealth of Virginia to finance
and found Virginia Tech through the forced removal of native nations from their lands
in California and other areas in the West. We also recognize enslaved black people generated revenue
and resources used to establish Virginia Tech and were prohibited from attending until 1953.
Through inclusive VT the institutional and individual commitment to Ut Prosim that I
may serve in the spirit of community diversity and Excellence we commit to advancing a more
diverse Equitable and inclusive community and I direct you to the inclusive VT page of Virginia
Tech for the full version of those statements. Okay, some brief housekeeping notes. This will
last approximately 45 minutes. Our speaker's presentation will be 20 to 25 minutes followed
by about 20 minutes question and answer discussion. All of the participants joining
via zoom will be muted to enable the speaker to present without interruption. After Dr.
Van Houweling's presentation people can raise their hand to ask questions of the speaker, people
joining via Zoom could also raise their hand or you can at any time during the presentation put
your questions into the chat and we'll be saving those into a Google doc and reading them later.
So if you prefer for us to read them you can do it that way um we asked for everyone to be respectful
and treat all participants with kindness and consideration without discriminatory behavior.
So again this is being recorded and you will have access to it later via our website so in advance
I'd like to let you know that we'll be sending you a survey link and we ask you to please please do
it. You can tweet us now by tagging @wgd_vt. Okay finally I know you're here to hear from Emily. So
to introduce our speaker Dr Emily Van Houweling's teaching and research interests include water and
sanitation, gender and development, participatory planning, and decolonizing development.
She has experience working and teaching in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa and
has most recently conducted community-based research on water and sanitation access with
unhoused population in Denver where she lives now. Her research has been published in leading
journals gender environment and development journals and her book Water Aid and Mozambique:
Gendered perspectives of change was published by Cambridge University press and just came out last
year. As I said earlier she received her Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in the planning, governance,
and globalization Ph.D. program I also want to say that I was on Emily's Ph.D. committee many years
ago and then she was an Associate Director of the women and gender in international development
program. So it was really exciting to be able to have her back and many people on
campus were also very excited to see her. So the title of her talk today is water
projects and gender goals in Mozambique, how the technocratic culture of International Development
conflicts with Community perspectives. So please welcome Dr. Emily Van Houweling!
It's really great to be back and see so many familiar faces. I've lived here a
long time and all of this research really started here. So it's good to be back.
I first went to Mozambique in 2010 with my advisor Ralph Hall and a group of students and faculty
members from Stanford University and our task was to set up an evaluation of a Rural Water Project
that was being installed in Northern Mozambique by the Millennium Challenge Corporation and I didn't
know at that time that I had made a commitment that would keep me coming back for several times
spending two years there over the next eight years has really follow this water project
and by spending so much time there closely following this project I was able to see how this
um just one example of how a development project unfolded how it affected
um Rural Life, how it was perceived and negotiated by community members and I
think it really offers a lot of insights that are useful in countries all over the world
and it allows me to tell a very different story about development um than the one that's
typically told by aid organizations, engineers or economists one that really elevates the voices
of those most impacted by water scarcity, in this case the women living in these rural communities.
A little bit about the place because I really want to shape the narrative around a specific cultural
and social place working in Northern Mozambique in a province called Nampula. The main ethnographic
or the main ethnolinguistic group there or the Makua they're small farmers. They farm beans,
rice, cassava, they sell some cashews and some coconuts um kind of a mix of Catholic and Islamic
beliefs in this area. It's one of the poorest areas of Mozambique um most people in the rural
areas don't have electricity, they live in modern brick houses, really low levels of education and
literacy and that's also reflected in the water situation where before this project 80 percent of
people were getting water from shallow wells like the ones you can see here are seasonal springs,
unprotected water sources and that people were quite dissatisfied with their water situation.
There were um especially during the dry season from basically like September through November,
December really long walks to get water um long weights of the water source for it to
recharge lots of health problems related to this and during the dry season it really affected all
aspects of life. Kids didn't go to school as often social events were canceled and people couldn't
bathe or wash clothes. Some people said they even didn't have enough to drink during these months.
So water was really connected to social um practices to livelihoods to spiritual
practices in this village and something that connected people to each other and
to the ancestors and also to um larger like the aid organizations and to the government.
In terms of the gender dynamics in this place on the Makua are a matrilineal society. So that means
that um women have quite a bit of power it's kind of social and cultural spiritual dimensions of
life. Land is passed through on the women's side and if there's divorce the women stay with the
land and the children at their on their mother's side and gender roles are fairly complementary.
There's quite a bit of flexibility in the gender division of labor. Women are the primary water
collectors but men will also help during the dry season and depending on the family structure
women are those that really control the traditional water source. I would love to get
rid of this so that it doesn't plug your slides. Okay women control the traditional water source
meaning they do like the the daily management and maintenance, the cleaning of the water sources,
regulating them and these traditional water sources have a lot of social value for women.
So it's a place where women get together from across villages, they can share information,
they can socialize, they can get out of the sort of the confines of their home and the watchful
eyes of men to just spend time with other women. It's also a place of shared work where they share
um doing dishes and laundry and information about like crop prices. So it has this important
social value for women um and there's a lot of intersectional differences. Not all women are
experiencing water scarcity in the same way and these differences related to like um class and age
um political party affiliation. These actually come to light
um as the Rural Water Project takes into effect. So I'll speak to some of these um in a minute now
for the project itself. It consisted of the installation of 600 hand pumps in Nampula and
then a neighboring district to the north called Cabo Delgado and it was installed by the or it was
funded by the Millennium Challenge Corporation and they're a relatively new U.S um Aid organization
they really pride themselves on giving money to countries that have good governance criteria
and they try to also justify the projects according to an economic rate of return models. So
their kind of Mantra is economic growth um how do they say it um poverty reduction through economic
growth so for the um for this Rural Water Project what they cared about were primarily two things
um that were supposed to result in more income being generated in the region resulting in
economic growth and poverty reduction. So the two things they cared about were Time Savings
that with installation of these hand pumps that women would be saving time collecting water
and the assumption was that they would use that time to enter income-generating activities
secondly um Health they thought that with this better quality of water being provided people
would spend less on doctors and it'd also be more productive in the jobs that they're doing so both
of those goals were reduced to an income stream that fed into this economic rate of return model
um the project was set up to be participatory and gender-sensitive managed by the community
uh to break a little bit of that down by community-based management they meant the
formation of a water committee that consisted of six men and six women
with you know pretty like rigid roles and how they would manage it also meant that people had to pay
for water that the community had to contribute a percent to the capital cost to get this project.
um So that's that's kind of what they meant by participatory we'll talk more about the gender
sensitive aspects um but there's also this notion of women's empowerment achieved through through
Time Savings so a lot of what I did was trying to interrogate some of these Concepts that sound
very good but they're based on a lot of kind of
faulty assumptions that don't take into account the context
so when I first went to Mozambique with the evaluation team I got a chance to talk to
um people in the community is also to the project implementers and from what I observed the kind of
the range of indicators that we had been charged to assess really didn't represent
the breadth or the depth of the impacts of this project so I proposed to spend more
time in these communities doing ethnographic research and was lucky to get a Fulbright that
supported me to have that independence and sort of critical thought about the project
but I wanted to capture um kind of the social meanings around water and understand how this
project was translated as it moved its way down to the community and how people were perceiving it
so I um kind of randomly chose five communities that were getting hand pumps
and would rotate kind of through these communities camping with my research assistant
um staying with either the leaders or the water Committee in each place
and spent a lot of time just accompanying women women on their daily tasks whether
that was getting water or farming or shelling cashews here and that was a chance to really
understand you know their experiences and ways of knowing and and give value to that
um also did a lot of interviews with the project implementers although from the government to the
Community workers uh that were implementing the project in this case they were called
like animators they were doing the trainings with the water committee
um getting things set up for the drilling to begin
so I described my research methodology as feminist because I started with a concern
that was really Central to women's lives. This water scarcity and I tried to use this practice
of reflexivity throughout my research process really thinking about how who I am as this you
know young white woman coming in how it affected the way people saw me, my interpretation of events
and really trying to check kind of my frames of reference like um how am I interpreting something
um and my research assistant there who's interviewing a woman um her name's Hortensia and
she was really critical in that process of helping me interpret and really translate she would
translate from Makua to Portuguese for me um and I think through this ethnographic research I was
able to capture some of the complexity of women's lives and their relationships with other women
in a very deliberate attempt to kind of counter some of the narratives that you hear about
um you know poor women from Africa being sort of oppressed by men and
religion and the water situation just showing that richness of their lives
So I found a lot of different things I'm going to focus on a couple of those that are specifically
related to gender um this was after being there kind of during the implementation where I saw
um the wells go in and then I was able to return five years later too to see what had happened um
if you remember back to the economic rate of return model their big income stream was coming
from Time Savings and the women who use the hand pumps did save some time but they used that time
um just to socialize with other women to take care of their families to take care of their
children to farm more so basically they were not um you know following this kind of a very Western
um oriented narrative that women want to earn money and that's like their their chief goal
there also weren't a lot of opportunities to earn money so women were spending time
um in kind of traditional uh gender roles that were appropriate for mothers and wives
and I did a focus group where I asked um can you describe what a what a good wife
one of the characteristics of a good wife ask men and women both the same with the husband
um but for women all the activities were really tied to water so a good wife um she prepares food
her husband and serves it on time cleans cleans the dishes in the house brings her
husband bath water does the laundry all of these depend on water and what happens
during the dry season is women aren't able to to satisfy um these expectations so it leaves
them with a lot of anxiety and stress and a lot of like physical work burden during this time
so this is relieved when the hand pumps come and women are able to better fulfill these
expectations this is an interview from a man talking about how um before or now things are
common good in the house like now after the hand pumps have come in the past before the
hand pumps women would be gone for a long time they would come home late and prepare
food late women didn't know where they were men didn't know where they were wouldn't trust them
so there there's improved relationships and Trust in the household because of this less conflict
um from a women's perspective she's talking about how they're using this time
um
So rather than you know this kind of uh Western vision of a self-reliant economically independent
woman um the women these Makua women were finding kind of their fulfillment in these roles
um and in relationship to their community and their family
Another outcome was that few women left their traditional water sources
and there's a actually a complex reasons why people didn't use the hand pumps
um that I'll touch on but for women especially there was a reluctance first to pay for water
um and this was because of beliefs that water is you know part of the environment it's given
to us by God if there's a long history of us just being able to to use water as we
want when we want without um any interference from you know having any kind of transaction
so there was a real reluctance especially among older people to pay for the hand pump when they
had free sources that were available um for women they didn't want to lose the
social aspects of the wells so even women that use the hand pump continued to use the wells
um where they would do laundry or dishes or get together with other women because that was one
of the few times they could really leave the house um women talked it as really a respite
for getting away from their husbands and having a chance to to be with other women it's where
girls initiation ceremonies happened here women could bathe naked naked you know in
private and had that space and the hand pumps they are located in the center of the Village
um and there is really no privacy around them so it took away all that that socializing that women
had at the at those more private wells and that also women lost the control and autonomy they had
um where they were really in control of the traditional Wells but at the hand pumps um the MCC
came in with a very rigid management model that was supposed to be gender equitable according to
kind of imposed standards but um it meant that women really the women that were managing the
wells lost control and they had to adhere to this other framework and very few women were
that were the presidents of the water committee which was kind of the highest level and a lot
of the women ended up doing the work of the daily cleaning and they're supposed to lock it
every day and collect money a lot of the work that put them in conflict with other people
um and created uh more work and and anxiety in their lives without any real benefits
Something else that was really unaccounted for by the MCC and also an evaluation the evaluation
compared communities that got hand pumps to those that didn't rather than looking at within
a community that got a hand pump what happened um did everyone benefit or some people left out so
when we did kind of a re-analysis of of our data we found there were actually more differences
within a community than between communities in terms of who benefited it who didn't
um this came out of quantitative um analysis and also the from what I found
but there is a geographic division um because these were large and dispersed communities and
a single hand pump was provided in the middle of them meaning you know why would you walk an
extra couple kilometers to get water when you had something closer to your house so
those that were right next to the hand pump um were really the ones that benefited the most
and that political decision of where to locate the hand pump was a big deal
there's also an economic division because you had to pay for the hen pump I estimate that like 20
of people really couldn't pay for it and another 20 had trouble kind of seasonally paying for it
and then there's a political division um the the politics of Mozambique
um mean that the for Lima party has been in charge of the country for a long time and government
projects are associated with uh with for limo party so the minority party of renama they felt
like they were not they were not asked to be part of any water committee they were not represented
but most um just community members felt like they were not allowed to use the hand pumps
um and you can see these quotes kind of testifying to these ideas and the the community members
really perceived these differences and how it Amplified some of these existing inequalities
I'm going to try and move that a little bit yeah that's what
I'm trying to find I don't see the view button
So are we trying to improve the view for you on Zoom so the people on Zoom can fix
it on their own computer so they're fine it's just uh that's just the people here
but there should be abundance as view hey yes thank you um what is diarrhea uh director just
the right and it was like the right two three yeah thanks Tom um and finally another um
uh Community conflict that was exacerbated was this um happened between communities and the whole
project they installed 600 hand pumps but 175 of them an additional 175 were negative boreholes
meaning the drilling rig comes in they drill 200 meters down and they don't find water and
the geophysics of the area are very difficult so this was common but the sad thing was is that it
wasn't really any follow-up in these communities so they were left very suspicious and distrustful
um even more so of Aid and of their neighbors that got it and when they didn't and it would literally
be you know the the neighboring community um was able to get a hand pump and they weren't so there
was a lot of tension that was exacerbated with this project without any follow-up
okay so I talked about some of the things that I saw that didn't go as expected
um and a lot of the other goals have a kind of unravel in a similar way
there are a lot of unintended social cultural consequences um and when I visited five years
later all the water committees had fallen apart and a lot of the hand pumps had technical issues
and my explanation of kind of what went wrong here starts with um the critical development theory
um premise that we can't impose this rigid blueprint on a very specific social-cultural place
um but I'm trying to extend that idea and also look at the institutional culture of development
and how like the values the Norms incentives um shape the implementation of this project
And I is this is not like trying to blame development workers but
to understand the environment and the culture in which they're working
um that determines really the rules of the game and what is seen and what can be done
um so I'll talk about a couple of these that I see as being quite relevant there was this
idea of best practices and all of these terms like sustainability and capacity building,
community management, women's empowerment you know they follow a set of fairly predictable sequences
and they're not really adapted to the context, there's no real consideration of critical
literature for almost any of these um problems that we found that with the project there was
other literature showing that we knew this would kind of happen if you would have consulted some
different literature if you would have talked to a different uh broader range of people
um in the planning but it was this um this idea of best practices that this hand pump model follows
at least throughout Africa and it's used you know in the project development almost to convince
um convince you of the legitimacy of the project by using these terms without any like grounding
in the context um the resources you know follow the incentives so the there was very little money
devoted to understanding the context at the beginning the planning pieces and very little
at the end to ensure sustainability all the money was going to put these hand pumps in the ground
um and that meant that things like the gender analysis weren't really taken seriously there
wasn't time or that the people um the skilled people in place to do a real gender analysis
or to do any sort of gender trainings things were implemented very superficially
it was a lot about counting the number of um you know trainings done and at the end of the day the
incentives for the MCC we're meeting this economic rate of return model and spending the money
in fact several of the implementers said you know what Congress really cares about at the end of the
day is that we've spent the money foreign so that that really structures where those
resources are going there's also this hierarchy that's that was quite obvious between MCC
um and the communities where there wasn't uh any way for knowledge to to pass up the
chain of command to really get to the ears of the decision makers and it when the MCC came
to Mozambique they had a series of meetings and really orchestrated field visits where
um they're taken to the best communities and the communities know how to perform also they
they show them certain things and Hive certain things um in order to to get what they want
from this project so it really um this distance hid the on the ground implementation challenges
and for the there's a lot of people in between those two right like the MCC and
then the community we had and in this case the the community animators or mobilizers
they're the ones you see in this picture is kind of working with the community telling them what's
happening about the project doing the trainings and they're really interesting to get to know um
because they had this really difficult challenge of trying to translate this
um sometimes inane for us like research protocols and for the MCC you know protocols for how they
have to form a water committee into language that the community understands um and then
Most of it, most of the community animators felt quite connected to the communities they were
empathetic to the struggles of the women many of them had grown up in rural areas they spoke Makua
um but they're also bound within incentives of the MCC they had short time periods they didn't have
many resources they had to do a certain number of trainings and they had some very simple reporting
forms at the end of the day they do this community meeting they count the number of women and men and
you know really simple things like the number of latrines that are constructed without saying
anything about um you know who's making decisions who's talking um to the community understanding
how they're perceiving this um are there any conflicts what are the politics around this stuff
so that simple reporting form gets translated into increasingly simplistic narrow categories until
it goes to Congress and there's you know a single number that represents the success of this project
um
What am I doing on time okay
um it's sort of some concluding thoughts here
so the outcomes really depend on Whose perspective matters
um so the ER con that was calculated by the MCC at the end of the project was quite high it was like
20 it's pretty good meaning that the benefits outweigh the cost by 20 in terms of income
um but when you look at all of these other ways that you could understand the project you come to
very very different conclusions um so most and I think most impact evaluations have a narrow
set of categories that they start with that are you know primarily like Western-based and
I leave those local perspectives out um and then in this case if we're looking at local
perspectives we would have very different categories for evaluating success so I think
it really challenges the idea that evaluation reports represent some kind of omniscient truth
about good or bad or that they even reflect the opinions of the beneficiaries themselves
oops um and rather that they're really tied to the ideologies and the values and the Norms of of
development and it leaves out all these all these um ways that women are really understanding change
in their own lives and doesn't recognize their own priorities and their their full identities
um and that kind of goes to this notion beyond success and failure uh the hand pumps were not
an unmitigated good or an unmitigated bad there was a lot of complexity ambivalence
that people had towards the hand pumps depended on who you talk to within every Community there
were some people that were very enthusiastic and happy relieved to have the hand pumps alongside
of those who had benefited in no way and were quite skeptical and distressful of the project
and women had something to gain but something to lose from this project as well some women were
happy to have water closer but some continued to use the customary sources for these social
purposes and they often didn't want to pay for the hand pump during certain seasons
um they also had a lot of conflicts it also created a lot of conflicts between
um between women and with leaders and with the water committee
and many women saw these water sources as complementary so they would um they didn't
abandon their customary water points and they would use the the hand pumps in ways in ways
that they wanted so when they wanted to save time and just get some clean water for drinking they'd
use the hand pumps the same time they'd still get to the customary water points every day to
for those social aspects and I think that just that notion of kind of going between sources
um disrupts this straightforward like modernization trajectory where
in development we sort of assume that women will abandon the traditional because it's sort
of oppressive and move towards the modern where they'll become empowered we see kind of um in
in nampula that women hold on to to tradition that gives them power they had a lot of power
in their matrilineal society but they're also ready to embrace those aspects of modernity that
they see as improving their lives this is a very strategic balance that they make for themselves
um lastly I think this my research and this story inspires a lot of kind of modesty and
curiosity and development attention to like learning and adaptation moving away from a
notion that we'll have this simple cause and effect um and martial something that builds on
local understandings and this idea of fluidity and adaptation and learning during a project
and um you know centering different voices and priorities in the process so that's that's what
I have. I'm excited for your questions and to elaborate on more um where you're interested.
So maybe we'll take some questions from here in the room if we have some and
then uh we have one from Larry Vaughn and yes if you can introduce yourself
and then uh Jess if you can look at the people have any questions.
Thank you! Has NCC changed its opinion on this idea of subscription
of digital water access to pay money and how did they break that monetary cost with this idea that
women would earn more money because some of that money has to go back into access to the corner?
um I don't think they've changed their prescription on the payment that I I was
just talking to the new gender specialist assigned to the MCC they have a new compact surprisingly
um given the governance challenges they've had but they have a new Compact and a gender
specialist was um she was already frustrated at the very beginning and saying that
um so many of so many of these themes were being repeated um and the payment for money
is something that's like part of a larger paradigm in real water planning of like
demand responsive planning. The idea is that the community will feel a sense of ownership if they
pay for the water and if they don't pay for it they won't value it but you know it's a very
Western idea of what how we value something and what ownership even means and can we own water
so there's a lot of those ideologies that feed into this idea where people should pay for water.
um and you talked about the payment itself not being subtracted maybe from the ER
that's that's a good point there's so many contradictions in um that they're pushing kind
of these neoliberal principles of paying for water and this idea of sense of ownership alongside
um the idea of community participation, voluntary Community participation
um like managing the water committee those people aren't paid but yet that you know they want the
payment over here but not over here so it's kind of like you can make an ER model that looks really
good and leave some things out and emphasize others and even the value they chose to put
in for women's free time it was very arbitrary you know it was based on the wage, the national
wage and no woman was making that and they weren't even doing income judging activities so
you can fill out those spreadsheets to your you know benefit but leaving a lot of things out.
All right first of all thank you that was really excellent and great to see you again.
My name is Tom Archibald, I work at CIRED. um I'm wondering if in the focus groups with
implementers at various levels you know from it would probably manifest differently for
the animators that's where like MCC country style to what extent were they aware of or critical of
these broader paradigmatics contradiction and you know because they could be aware of them but then
sort of trapped in the hegemony uh this was just the way we do it even if we know it's a little
bit silly yeah and you already spoke a little bit how that animators were kind of as intermediary
before in that tension and aware of it so how did they grapple with that um and then and then the
sort of higher ups that refer to the hierarchy were they aware of it and just trapped them?
um yeah they were most you know if you got people if you're able to establish enough rapport that
people talked to you in a real way um and often it was outside of the formal interview it would
be like me you know following them on their daily you know walking with them to get coffee
or or they would make a remark you know this kind of remarks that you make over dinner that
you might not share publicly but oh man like we know this is a mess or like there's no way these
all the project implementer said we know that there's no way these hand pumps are gonna last
and everyone knew it and we and knew what needed to be done to make them last but this
is a five-year compact they're out the government had no capacity to keep managing these hand pumps
and again in the economic rate of return model they put a 20-year it was based on a 20-year
expectation of the hand pumps working and no hand pumps worked that long with no support. So
and even at the highest level the what was this guy called like kind of the regional MCC guy
the highest level I met you know he would he really was interested in my stories and
um would relate it to other things he had seen but said you know or stop you know this is it was
such a a rigid model there wasn't like no room to deviate um you know and people found I think the
implementers found small ways they could help and adjust things and turn their eye to things like
I know that a lot of communities weren't in fact requiring water payments during the rainy season
and some animators just ignored that others choose chose to like you know get involved but
everyone has a little bit of flexibility right and there is
um you know one good the office level who said you know we have here's a little bit
of extra money we could buy T-shirts for the water committee because they wanted something
to for all this work that they were doing for no pay and you know t-shirts or something so that
there's small adjustments that people can make within this ideologist framework but
everyone kind of felt trapped with every every level and they're all pointing higher right?
Thank you so we have a question from the zoom from Ann Oberhauser. Has this
area been impacted by the insurgent violence in Northern Mozambique? If
so did this conflict affect his women's mobility and access to water of the wells?
um yeah good question. um so the conflict kind of started when I had left uh my last time was 2019..
2018. um the conflict started after coming from Cabo Delgado now with a lot of especially um
internal migrants coming into Nampula from that conflic.t um so I'm not I wouldn't really feel
comfortable saying how it's affecting women's uh the water access but I think that a lot of the
ideology around the conflict um was alive and well in Nampula and there it there's a lot of
conflicting interpretations of what's happening in Mozambique but um from what I've seen there's
a lot of frustration with all the crazy amount of wealth that's being generated in the country
especially in this area of mineral wealth there's all kinds of big mining operations going in and
local people are seeing all the wealth that's being created and they're not benefiting poverty
rates have increased in this area over the last couple decades at the same time
all this mineral wealth has been generated. So there's a lot of frustration and this is a
longer historical trajectory too of exploitation especially in this region and of the government
really not being responsive to local concerns this is tends to be an area where there's more
people from the minority political party feeling alienated from the government
so um the point of all this is that there's a lot of frustration anger with the government that
erupted into this conflict and it also affects the way people see aid um and is kind of in the
same way that I've seen some of these government projects as kind of distant forces coming in and
disrupting their lives without any understanding of what they really want. So that's the connection
I can draw. I would be interested in going back and seeing how it's affecting water access now.
Any questions?
[Question
from the audience, audio not clear]
You know your your question about why hand pumps is a really good one and we were part
of early discussions with MCC encouraging them to think about a broader range of Technology options
knowing that geophysics were difficult and that's why some places got in some didn't
like the technical reason um and also knowing that these were large dispersed communities
that one hand pump in the middle wasn't going to going to solve. So we were advocating for more
um you know small pipe systems that would have more taps.
Really what it was is um this was in Millennium Developmental time that
um there was a policy the Mozambique policy was that one hand pump equaled like 600 people
served and it was about meeting the Millennium development development goals or showing enough
progress that they would continue to get aid and that was like the least or the
most cost effective way to to show coverage and access really quickly. That was what it was and
there wasn't really a policy for the small pipe systems yet they couldn't justify it.
We have another question from Zoom yeah it's from Annette Mukurazita
Is there a reason that Western empowerments bleed out local values and perspective because
they do not know them because to understand that you have to
have the ability to navigate different epistemologies? Pretty good question.
I think yeah so many aid organizations are stuck in a in this Western epistemology that's
very positivist um and you know focus on us on certain things like like income and independence
for women and women having autonomy and that leaves out a lot of these other dimensions that
yeah you need other ways of knowing and thinking to really to capture well I think and when you
do it doesn't it's hard to um you know make those fit within the categories that aid value So even
if you find out all these interesting and Rich things trying to use a different epistemology
they don't fit within the spreadsheets that the MCC has so I think there's there's that tension
it's part of it is you know finding the right people who can translate those epistemologies but
also changing some of the the values and norms and tools of that are valued by development
any more questions [Music]
so I was just wondering like how how would the how did the economics of the hand pumps work
in Miami how was the money kept who kept it um and then where did that money go with that money
for maintenance or or what and then as well in this project when they expected women to
you know enter money making opportunities was any part of the project meant to develop yeah
any opportunity for them or was it yes they'll figure it out because they'll have more time yeah
okay really good questions um yeah so money was like it became to me it was really at the heart
of a lot of the sustainability challenges and the expectation was that this money they were
collecting um for for tariffs was supposed to be saved for if there was a breakdown of a handball
um but that wasn't clearly explained to all the users so they were like very suspicious
like who's getting this money you know who's keeping it why um who's responsible if it does
break and there wasn't there's not rule banking so it was really you know kept in somebody under
somebody's bed and it disappeared a lot of times um you know people say it's stolen or that that
the leader ate it or you know a lot of different experts one Nations Trail where it went but it
created more conflict in the community about this money who is getting rich off this hand pump and
from the literature we also know that when a hand pump does break there's that this
fund is usually not available it's it's gone and I had an interesting conversation with a
focus group about this and asking like you know is there what do you see as a solution
to this and somebody said rather than like um or when we get to a certain amount like
we should buy an animal like a chicken or a goat or something and then people everyone could see
it would like put it by the hand pump and everyone could see it and they were like know what it's for
it's very transparent compared to putting like money under your bed and that's what that was
a good idea but um yeah the money and the conflicts they created were um at the heart of
a lot of these sustainability challenges and the your question about income generating activities
yeah they there were there were none created or imagined or training opportunities even provided
um for the women that might have opened up some spaces for them it was just like
yeah or earned income there's just a big assumption
um so you had said that when you went back all of the books
know when you're working all of the groups are disbanded and then those
[Music]
maybe around the table um I guess my question is is MCC just kind of
hold this up as a success story or what's what have they learned
yeah it is held up as a success story and especially in relation so it was actually a small
piece of the the whole contact was 500 million dollars those would be the real water thing was a
small piece of that but they hold that up as being the most successful part which is kind of scary
um I mean it had the most rigorous evaluation and at the end of what they got from the evaluation
was that err model so I think people that were closely connected to the project probably learned
something but the ones that just saw that err model probably didn't learn that much
um the the new compact it's not I don't think it's public or released yet I just
talked to this woman and her she said it was mostly focused on road construction
says she was doing the gender analysis of for the for the roads so I can't I don't think it had a
Water Project associated with it you know these comebacks are happening throughout the world and
throughout Africa um and I know there's a lot of focus on urban
uh water management privatization and things like that so
what the the gender specialist is saying is there's even a stronger push towards privatization
which is like ironic because they care so much about good governance and working
with the government but it's very it's even moved further towards private sector [Music]
um we have another question from Zoom um [Music]
in the matrilineal society did women have a voice and dialogue with the MCC
so nowhere in any of the planning reports did MCC mention it was a matrilineal society
it was all based on these assumptions about poor African women that they were oppressed and they
the only thing they cited was one um report done by a religious organization that said
that women were oppressed by men and Islam um it was a very blanket statement when we're on other
problems with that but um yeah nowhere did they under take time to see the difference between
North and South Mozambique in terms of the power that women had in these different dimensions so
there's not another question yeah earlier just remembering the situation you were in
and it was also reflected in your presentation here but as a student so I'm wondering how you
manage the tension between being a student who is there to learn to research what is going to
find out you know the truth even though we know there's an objective truth and all that but yeah
try to figure out what's going on yeah but you're being funded or you're a part of in some way this
project so and I know it you know then then how do you write that and where did you write
that and how do you speak what you learned so can you talk about the tensions a little bit sure um
yeah it was kind of hard for me internally because I was kind of working for this project in a sense
that it was a student and had had a role and spent more time there than anyone else um with
um the evaluators and setting up the training for the evaluation but yet I was pretty uncomfortable
about the evaluation process but I tried to I mean the evaluation was just like you know two months
at the beginning two months at the end and it was like you can put your critical cap on you have the
funding coming in from uh from Fulbright um so trying to distance myself from that project and
especially in eyes of the community members you know to to say you know I I now I'm a student
and to kind of empathize with their concerns and to you know spending that extra time with
them rather than you know going and coming like they see all the aid organizations doing
um but you know it was they still had these expectations that I was that I could change
something that I should be giving them gifts and all so I never did that very cleanly
and it was always kind of an internal um tension that I had in the in terms of writing up I did try
and reflect on those moments each day and in in my field notes it comes up a few times in the book
I talk about that um when I'm you know presenting my findings to different audiences how they're
responding um how the community is seeing me and yeah it's it's these like small
small ways that you're um you know fitting in in different groups and that they're accepting you or
or distrustful of you or thinking that you're naive or silly or annoying or
depending on who you're talking to but um you know just trying to be open about it and reflect on it
and talk with other researchers about that too who are trying to you know navigate similar Dynamics
Okay so it is now our time 1:31 so I want to um let's see I have my notes but I want
to thank everybody for attending and especially thank you Dr. Van Houwelling for flying in and
spending some days with us and for your wonderful presentation like I said we'll send you a survey
please fill it out, it'll take you one minute or longer if you want to share more things including
comments that we pass on to the speaker. And then we have some great speakers lined up Jess
will be the next one and then uh a food author Nina Mukerjee Furstenau in on April 13th you
can look at our website for more information. Have a wonderful day! Take some food on your
way out please if you came in person so not the rest of you on Zoom. So um thank you very much!