Welcome to the Virtual Women and Gender in International Development Discussion Series
at Virginia Tech. Everybody please stay muted or we get a lot of noise across. So anyway as of
this morning, we had 85 people registered for today's event so that's very exciting might be
our highest number yet Sidra! Besides lots of students faculty and staff from Virginia
Tech we have folks joining us from other US universities; University of Texas at Austin,
UC Davis and Emory University and a special shout out to Dr Zare's Global feminisms class who is
joining us and we have several other organizations in the US including Cultural Practice, D.A.I and
USAID as well as folks from other organizations in Pakistan Ireland and Sudan. So welcome
everybody so please note that our event will be recorded.
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Now some brief housekeeping notes This event will last approximately 45 minutes.
Our speaker presentation will be 20 to 25 minutes followed by about 20 minutes of discussion
and Q&A with the audience.
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us to get your feedback for our planning and our funding and now to introduce the speaker
Ms. Sidra Khalid is a national researcher at the International Water Management Institute.
She's an experienced international development practitioner and researcher in gender and social inclusion throughout her career.
Ms. Khalid has led projects across diverse sectors including WASH, reproductive health, livelihoods and women's empowerment championing gender equity and social inclusion.
She's worked with renowned organizations like CARE and save the children
leading and contributing to gender transformative programming including authoring a gender equality
curriculum for young adolescents in Kyrgyzstan. Sidra holds a Master's degree in Development
Practice from Emory University and a Bachelor's degree in Sociology from UC Berkeley.
Ms. Khalid is currently based in Pakistan working as a gender and social inclusion researcher with
the um International Water Management Institute (IWMI) her research there focuses on gendered and social vulnerabilities in the water sector covering topics such as climate change, water management, health, food security, disaster reduction, energy, poverty and sociopolitical norms shaping decision-making access to and use of water resources and
Today she will present findings from a study that examines factors affecting water security in urban Pakistan through a gendered lens.
The title of her talk is "Who is more water insecure? Gendered evidence from Urban Pakistan"
Please welcome Ms. Sidra Khalid and she will share her screen if you have any problems um
seeing my computer was having some problems but other people's weren't just please send me a
email um or chat rather and and I'll I have her power point and I can share it from my computer
Okay welcome Sidra!
Thank you, Maria um Can you just confirm if you can see my screen.
I see it well so that means others probably can see it
Okay thanks, so um good afternoon everyone and um good evening from Pakistan. uh So I'm Sidra Khalid. I'm working as a GESI researcher with IWMI uh here in Pakistan um and today I'm going to be sharing uh some interesting research findings from a study
we conducted uh in in Two Urban towns uh under a research project okay okay um so before I begin.
I just want to give a bit of context for those of you who aren't familiar uh with Pakistan and its
uh water security and and climate vulnerabilities. so Pakistan's the fifth most populated country uh
in the world with an annual growth rate of 3%. uh It's ranked as critically insecure in the UN
Global Water security assessment um and it's one of the top 10 most vulnerable countries
to climate change um number eight actually so the economy is uh mainly dependent on the agriculture sector.
95% of our water uh goes towards the agriculture sector and the remaining 5% is used.
Let me know when it's done uh the remaining 5% is used towards um uh domestic and Industrial use.
The country is rapidly urbanizing. It has one of the highest rates of urbanization
in South Asia around 40% of the population is now in urban areas um so this is increasing.
The demand for domestic um and industrial water use so from estimates suggests that this demand
is going to increase from 5% to 15% um in within the next few years um so of course all of this is
exacerbated by climate change um and we're seeing a lot more increased burden on water supply.
water quality infrastructure and Management Systems um especially in urban areas.
So in terms of some of WASH statistics that that would be useful to know um only around 40% of people have
access to safely managed water and 58% to basic sanitation and one of the biggest um issues is
lack of funding for WASH service provision um so there. Estimates suggest that if Pakistan were
to meet its uh WASH SDG targets by 2030, it would need uh 450 billion Pakistani Rupees which is approximately uh 1.6 billion US dollars annually um and for comparison the the wash budget in 2023 was only uh 265 billion.
So you can see there's a huge gap um in funding uh the country also has a
lot of issues with water quality uh we rank 80 out of 122 in terms of drinking water quality
and there's high prevalence of waterborne diseases again this is all exacerbated uh
with climate change and climate extreme events like flooding and droughts um so around for uh
30% of all uh diseases are contributed by poor water quality and 40% of deaths are attributed
um to water issues um and then in terms of sanitation and wastewater treatment, uh
It has really really low rates. Unfortunately um barely 1% of domestic and Industrial Wastewater
uh is receiving treatment in the country. So in terms of the gender situations uh particularly
in the water sector um so overall uh Pakistan does not uh do well in terms of gender equality scoring
so in the Global Gender Gap Index uh the latest 2024 score, it's the second to last country just
above Afghanistan. um It's actually dropped three points since 2023 where we used to be uh 140 143 um and in terms of the seven countries in the South Asian region it's the lowest so number seven.
So in Pakistan's context women and girls are disproportionately bear the burden
of water insecurity. So this can look like um increased time burden for water collection, uh
this has impacts on their mental health and stress uh reduced education opportunities and increased
vulnerability to gender-based violence and poor WASH access also increases the risks of waterborne
diseases um and then particularly uh for those who menstruate it compromises menstrual hygiene management.
This is also linked to uh a reduction in economic opportunities and social
participation and then particularly in Pakistan um women's participation and decision- making in
water management is very low um or if they are involved it's it's very tokenistic participation.
We see largely that uh nationally gender WASH data is missing um we're not really collecting
enough information um on what's happening with men what's happening with women and other gender
groups? This is kind of the backdrop of um what IWMI is doing in Pakistan and in this particular study.
We really wanted to know um you know what are the different needs of different gender groups um specifically in urban urban communities and when it comes to WASH.
So, Disaggregated data is so important because it tells us uh precisely these things who has access to what who doesn't and if we really want to inform better policies um that are evidence-based and gender transformative uh program
uh we need we need to collect this information um and then on a in a broader sense if we're linking this with the sustainable development goals.
Right now the data that the government collects uh at the national level it's either at the household level or just you know provincial wise.
So no one's really um collecting sex disaggregated data. It's really hard to measure what actual progress we making um so
This is kind of where our starting point was for this uh for this study and um and the fact that
only a third of countries in the world collect sex disaggregated data for water management um which
is quite alarming so to get now to the survey that we conducted um so we conducted a survey
in Two Urban towns in Pakistan in the capital city of Islamabad and its neighboring uh Twin City of Rawalpindi
The two towns are called Farash town which is in Islamabad and James town um in
Rawalpindi and really uh this was part of this study was part of an ongoing research project
that we're conducting um in in collaboration with WWF Pakistan it's an Australian aid funded project
called uh the Australia Pakistan water security initiative um so we're already working in these
communities so we decided we really want to get this Baseline assessment of what the WASH status
is and then particularly looking at this through a gender lens. So we we surveyed a total of 560
uh men and women across the both of these towns uh using proportional sampling based on their their
population sizes uh with equal numbers of men and women um and I will just point out that we we only
surveyed um self-reported and self-identifying men and women um so those are the terms that I will
use but we acknowledge that there are diverse gender groups um in Pakistan um and one thing
I will point out if you notice uh the maps of the towns um you'll see that Farash town um has
a bit of a more grid like uh uh organization and structure because it is in the the capital city
whereas Jamestown is a bit half-hazard planned um because it's it's not under the capital.
The capital Development Authority or the CDA um is also responsible for providing water supply
to to all areas in Islamabad um whereas in in Rawalpindi uh people have to rely on on other
sources um so I'm going to share just some of the the general survey findings then go into to some
of the deeper analysis that we did um so in terms of the drinking water sources um based on what I
just mentioned about about where the towns are located. Most of the people in Jamestown are
using filtration plants and in Farash town they're using public tankers um we also asked about
the you know how reliable or how available water was from these sources um and only
around a quarter of households report or individuals reported that water is available all year long.
So there's lots of issues with um interrupted water supply in these two areas.
So we also asked questions about how accessible the water source is to people with disabilities or
limited mobility how uh people perceived this the safety of the source um for women and young boys
and girls to access and the mode of collection. This was a really we got the interesting findings
on me kind of did a disaggregated analysis so in Jamestown a lot less people uh reported the source
as inaccessible and the the main source they use are filtration plants while in Farash town um a
lot 45% um reported their drinking source as inaccessible and when you look at the the sex
disaggregated responses you'll see in James town, more men are saying this um and then in Farash Town 74% um of women are saying this so the reason is because uh the one is filtration plants are
um just set in one location so they're easier to access whereas public tankers are uh they're not they're mobile right.
So it just depends where they are they might be um women might be worrying
more about distance or just where where the public tanker decides to park um and then we also found
that in Jamestown men are the primary water collectors while in Farash town it's actually
women who are the primary water collectors. This may explain some of these differences
that we're seeing um and then especially in terms of safety where more people in Farash town are
saying that the water source is not safe um and then in terms of mode of collection uh also very
interesting that majority of men in both the towns are collecting water uh through a motorcycle and
none of the women that we surveyed collect water through this mode of transportation and if you're
familiar with um Pakistan, it's very very unlikely that you will see a woman riding a motorcycle by herself.
This speaks to kind of time time it takes to collect water uh which in which increases
women's time burden if they're walking versus um using a motorcycle so again we kind of got
different answers based on who the primary water collector is what's the main source of drinking
water and how men and women are thinking about safety uh so these are these are actually two
pictures from uh Farash town this is what the CDA public tankers look like so you can see.
I mean there's no organized lines uh they're just kind of parked haphazardly men and women are
both collecting water at the same time so you can imagine in times when there's water shortages.
People who are you know more aggressive or you know pushing through the lines they're the ones
who are going to get water um which might explain why why women more women in Farash town reported
um issues of safety um so we also asked uh women who were menstruating. Some of their the challenges
that they faced so alarmingly nearly 40% of women are facing challenges due to water related issues
um causing them stress and difficulty. Around a quarter reported that they have limited access
to water for washing and cleaning their bodies while they're on their period and for change
when they're changing their hygiene materials and a lot of the women so just over half
are using clean water but it also means that a significant number were using unsafe water
which explains why we heard more women reporting issues with skin rashes and irritations.
There was a really interesting um difference between how women were managing their periods
inside their homes versus outside their homes. 60% can easily manage inside versus 20 almost
half of that um when they're outside. it's more difficult which kind of speaks to the masculine
nature of uh public sanitation Infrastructure especially in Pakistan and then some very briefly
some of the other differences that we saw was men were more aware of community water issues
um women were not receiving as much information or trainings on water related issues from NGOs in the
area and as I mentioned women uh were experiencing higher prevalence of different waterborne
illnesses so we implemented in the survey something called the individual water insecurity experiences or the IWISE scale.
this is a globally validated Tool uh with 12 questions
related to experiences different experiences with water uh water insecurity and if you score 12 or
more um you're considered water insecure so when we when we uh implemented the IWISE you can see
that uh both of the towns are way more water insecure than water water secure um and we you
can see Farash town is a slightly less water insecure which we would expect because it is
um in the capital city and has a bit better infrastructure um so then of course we we
wanted to ask well does this differ does water insecurity differ across genders and as you can
imagine it absolutely does um so across both towns women are much more water insecure than
men and then even within uh so across and then within each town uh men are more water secure
it's a really drastic difference um that we can see and this has implications
that we can now share with you know our government partners you know people in the CDA when they're
thinking about different interventions that they wouldn't they would have otherwise not known if
we um were just presenting aggregate results. So we also then went a bit deeper and conducted
a more um a deeper analysis to identify the key factors influencing water insecurity and uh we
published a paper on this last month which I'm happy to share in the chat after this.
We used a multivariate binary logistic model um and we're looking at how variables like gender, age, education, socioeconomic status, employment,
If they're paying for water, what the drinking water source is, uh concern levels about water issues, overall satisfaction with water supply and water quality perceptions.
These were all the variables the independent variables we put in this
model based on the survey data that we had and we wanted to see and we also calculated the marginal effects.
I'm not going to show all the equations and everything for the interest of time but all
the detailed methodology of this um is in the paper but we essentially just wanted to see you
know who is more likely to be water insecure and which variables um are the strongest determinants.
This is a very um simplified version of the model results um so the green lines show that
these are the variables that had a positive and statistically significant impact on water security
and the red lines indicate that these are the variables that had um a negative but statistically
significant uh impact on water security and then the symbols are for either uh men or women so
Interestingly uh for older men actually they were more likely to be the older the men are the more
likely they are to be water insecure um for both men and women uh if they are paying for drinking
water they're less likely to be water secure um and another interesting finding was that wealth
levels um only had a significant and positive impact uh for increasing men's levels of water
security while um being employed having higher education levels and using an improved drinking
water source had a positive and significant impact for women um which is really interesting has
broader implications for for targeted programming for women um and then for both men and women the
more likely they were concerned about future water issues the more satisfied they were with
their the drinking water supply and quality the more likely they were to be water secure
um so interesting findings and just looking at um gender on its own uh it was only when it was
interacting with these different variables where it where it impacted water security levels so as
I just mentioned gender gender by itself was not the strongest determinant of water Security in
this model that we in these models that we ran but its interaction with the other variables played a
stronger role in affecting water security um so really what our study um was telling us is the
importance of um you know conducting these types of inter sectional analyses when we're conducting
uh this type of water research so gender is not the only social identity which affects access to
Water Resources um and and WASH practices in this case and we really want to be thinking
about um this idea of intersectionality and how different social identities are interacting to
create uh different experiences of Oppression um so I mean in some contexts uh men are more
water insecure than women uh but we just would never know that unless we're conducting these
more nuanced um analyses um and then in of course in Pakistan setting and and a lot of other places
access to and control over water and then wash services by men and women is largely shaped um
by social and power relations so the key kind of takeaway um from our study and what we're using
in our advocacy work now is that improving gender water data is key and uh there I mean there's this
famous phrase of that we can't manage but we don't measure and in Pakistan's case that's absolutely
true we are not collecting enough disaggregated data so we don't understand what's happening with
women with men and with other gender groups. It's not just enough to quantify you
know counting how many women or how many men but we also need to be assessing um impacts
of different WASH interventions and programming and what we're hoping. I mean what we we're trying
to do with this study is one um contribute to this gender gap gender Water Gap in Pakistan
and we're trying to say that you know the more we conduct these kinds of studies and we're building
this evidence base we're putting more pressure and creating more accountability with decision
makers because right now we hear a lot like you know oh we just don't we just don't have enough
evidence we just don't have enough data um but the more we collect this disaggregated data then
policy makers or decision makers ignoring this evidence that then becomes a deliberate policy
choice that they're making or programming choice rather than just an oversight so an other kind of
implication and takeaways um one again our finding support Global evidence that women and girls are
disproportionately affected by poor wash services and facilities. Another thing that we wanted
to showcase um is that you know communities are not homogeneous and when we talk about community
programming, we really need to dig a bit deeper and think about okay who makes up this
community um if it's you know a inter intervention that's being designed who will have access who
will benefit who won't um so even these two towns are really relatively small towns in Pakistan so
but even then people living in these same towns and similar areas, they had completely different
water concerns and perceptions and experiences and levels of water water security um so tools.
Like the IWISE scale, there's also a household level one called HWISE so using tools like these
can help pinpoint these differences um and better guide where intervention is needed and for whom.
Then the last kind of takeaway that we are also using now moving forward in our programming
is that we need to take gender considerations into account and not just conducting um you know gender
analysis and then writing a report but using those findings to improve policy and improve
programming uh because when planners or policy makers fail to account for gender um interventions
or policies by default they become male-dominated um and a perfect example of this is um Pakistan's
National Water Policy. There is no mention of gender in this policy at all and there's
only one clause that mentions women. It's only in the context of um domestic water management.
This is a perfect example and and this policy is supposed to be you know the the blueprint for the
country on improving Water Resource Management um and water security.
It's a bit um troublesome that it's not um taking gender into account. I'll stop here and um yeah I will share the paper link in the chat too if anyone is interested in reading it.
Thank you for sharing that.
Let's see I'm gonna actually ask
Bonnie Zare to unmute herself uh we have a couple questions um so if we go to Bunny's there and then
uh Yugasha if you let me know in the chat uh if you want to speak yourself or if you want me to
read your question so go ahead Bonnie please. Thank you so much for sharing this wealth of information
with us. um I have two questions that are just really asking you to elaborate the first one is
um thinking that many of of the folks here are not used to seeing how people take care of themselves
um out outside um when they are dealing with their um menstrual situations I was one if you
could just explain that inside outside statistic a bit more and then the other question is when
you talked about how if you pay for water you're actually more likely to be water insecure which was not what I was expecting.
Yeah. I will I should explain the question more so basically our the question was um how uh how easy it is for the woman to change and wash herself in
private when when on her period inside her house and then the same question for when she's outside
the house traveling or running errands so that was yeah that was the difference and again um I mean a
lot of Public public toilets in Pakistan are not very um MHM friendly at all there's often not you
know toilet paper available or you know they might just be dirty there's not soap available
of you know so it that was a really interesting finding for us at least that that public spaces
also need to be thinking about need to be designed also with women and and other groups in mind um
and then the uh you asked about paying for water. Yeah so basically uh the the point of that
was that um as I mentioned so the Farash town is gets public supplied free public water from
the the capital Development Authority so uh people in Rawalpindi or Jamestown a lot of them are also
using so they're using either filtration plants or they're paying for water uh through private
tankers and the private tankers um they often hike up the prices as well um so that plays into it.
Actually if you look at WHO's definitions of improved and unimproved drinking water sources
uh tankers are actually considered an unimproved Source uh because they they could be contaminated um so that also plays into that okay
Now I'd like to ask Yugasha Bakshi to unmute themselves, they have a question.
Thanks Sidra for the very insightful presentation.
I had a question about the water source in these particular communities that you shared with us um is groundwater at all
utilized as a water source and if yes to what extent is it utilized as a primary or secondary water source and what are the factors that influence its use or you know the lack of its
use is it money is it Finance is it the I don't know the infrastructural um requirement to kind
of you know dig bore holes uh bore holes um stuff like that. Thank you.
Thanks for that. The main water resources for both Islamabad and Rawalpindi are both surface and groundwater and
the water supply uh so for Islamabad it comes from a nearby Simly Dam and Khanpur Dam and then
for Rawalpindi it's uh Khanpur and Rawal Dam. So those are the main water sources um and uh
groundwater has been depleting um so in Islamabad it's been depleting uh one meter per year that's the average rate
and in Rawalpindi it's 2.5 meters per year. so the country nationally not just even
in cities but groundwater is slowly depleting uh Pakistan only has 30 days of water storage, um a 30-day water supply if they if we ran out of water
and I think like for the US it's 200. Something um you know just for comparison so so issues like climate change like flooding, droughts.
Pakistan also deals with a lot of droughts. This is all affecting um the water supply.
Larry, Can you go ahead and unmute yourself and Thank you for your question yes thank you.
Thank you Sidra. I was wondering with the very Stark difference in in the measure of
water security between men and women if you were only surveying those men or those women who were
responsible for retrieving water or if you were measuring men and women's opinions from within
the same household in other words does each man and each woman represent an entire household or
do you have men and women's opinions from within the same household? yeah so the the sampling was
such that uh it was we we use the household as the entry point and within each household we
only were interviewing either a man or a woman um but for the the IWISE scale the questions are
asked at the individual level um so there's also a household version of that but we wanted to get the
difference uh between men and women um so the questions are phrase that the person would be
responding based on their own experiences um yeah. I hope I answered your question. Yes Thank you.
I was asking that I wonder if how you distinguish between the the perception of
of water security by a particular man or a particular woman and the actual water
security of that household uh yeah I mean we don't have a way of comparing that.
I mean this is just perceptions um the IWISE scale uh we just kind of we can make certain
assumptions just based on what we know about the area that these communities and the work
that we do there but we weren't I mean we haven't kind of not in a scientific
way have we measured you know what what this household's what security levels are. Thank you!
Okay so we have another question from Deborah Ruben. Let's see would you like to ask directly.
Sure I think you answered it actually in responding to the previous two questions it sounds
like you don't have the data from what you said to Larry to know whether the actual water security
differs for those households that have their own groundwater sources um but perhaps you know
something about the perceptions of water security I'm I was building on both the question about
the groundwater which I thought was great because we don't know enough about gender and groundwater
use um but also the data that you showed that said that men I think men and women both reported
insecurity perceptions of insecurity if they had to pay for the water but that wealth was related
to a positive level of security for men or women. I'm sorry I don't for men okay so it costs money
to put in a groundwater well um so I'm just interested in the connections there yeah I
mean we we have the data because we asked each household what their source is um but for the
model, it wasn't like it didn't sparse that out um but that's that's a very interesting question.
so I will probably go back and see if there is any difference um based on the the Water
Source because we we do have that information it would just be a a different type of analysis but
definitely something we can we can do thanks that would be great. So I just want to read a comment
from um somebody who had to leave um Monamie Haines but I thought it was a very interesting
comment. They said they really appreciate appreciated your discussion about how gendered infrastructure prevents adequate menstrual hygiene management so much of international mhm development initiatives focus on providing people with better personal Menstrual Hygiene Management tools lowcost often environmentally sustainable paths not on the political work of improving um surround infrastructure infrastructure. Thank you for your talk.
So, we do have time. I don't see any more questions here. I haven't gotten to the bottom. Here no. I don't see any more questions. So this is also you know this is called the discussion series and you know the
reason that it's a little clunky the way we do this is that we've insisted on keeping this as a zoom meeting rather than a webinar so that we can have this interaction um that isn't possible.
We have a question from Yugasha Bakishi again. So, please go ahead and unmute yourself.
I was also interested in knowing Sidra what were the reasons behind choosing
this particular form of framework for this um exercise? Did you look into other Frameworks or what was it that appealed about the IWISE um scale that led you to use that for this? thank you yeah
so the these um water and security experiences scales uh so there's the IWISE which is at the individual level.
the main reason we use the IWISE versus the household level one or any other scale for measuring water insecurity is that these IWISE scales are really capture more
like the human experience of water water security so they'll ask questions like um you
know how how you know when in the last four weeks you know did you ever um did you ever have to
you know change your plans because of issues with water did you ever have did you ever um
feel shame or embarrassment because you didn't have enough water so they ask um they ask kind
of they capture more of the human experience of it which the other Frameworks that I've
looked at just look at kind of um you know how much water they have or what's the water source like these type of metrics I think don't necessarily capture the difference especially the
gender differences um in in water insecurity so that was the main reason why why we decided to use.
We have a comment from Tooba um and I asked if they would like to speak or uh if I should read their message.
Okay well they were just very appreciative of this but don't understand what it means to have
this from a non WEIRD and super underrepresented setting. Thank you for your work.
Does anybody know what that means the non-weird? Sorry. I also just um shared the link to the the paper that goes into more detail um of the the modeling that we did for those who are interested.
Great. Tom Archibald is saying-WEIRD is Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic.
Tooba just said the same thing. Great. Thank you. That's great um well. We still have at least five minutes of Q&A discussion.
So, I'll have a question okay so it was pretty striking to me that you said that the National Water Policy does not refer to gender at all. I'd like to hear more on that and if you see any hope of that uh changing if there's going to be another water policy I mean there's a lot of talk of water and gender and climate change in Pakistan and proposals and calls for proposals that we see. It's kind of scary to me any comment.
Pakistan has so many policies um related to water and climate change and and you know adaptation so
the water policy was developed in 2018 um and I'll also say though that most the water sector
is predominantly male male dominated so you're not you know they're they're thinking more along
the lines of kind of Technical Solutions um so I don't really know who was involved in the writing
process of that but um it it doesn't surprise me actually that they don't speak of gender um
but part of the work that we're doing at IWMI is um you know helping provincial governments
uh implement the the National Water policy at the provincial level so we've done a lot
of trainings on how to make these policies more gender sensitive um but you know that's just one
policy the National Climate Change policy does speak a lot about gender it has its own separate gender climate uh gender action plan
Last year the country published their National adaptation plan so that speaks a lot about gender.
So they're I think they're getting better um but the issue again always comes down to implementation um
and you know at at the community level you know are these things really you know really going to happen.
If we do not have other questions, I'd like before I do my little closing ritual.
I do want to ask Sidra if you have anything else that you thought of that you'd like to share with us based on the questions or I know you were kind of limited in your 20-minute presentation.
yeah so I actually um I spoke to Dr. Young, a few weeks ago who's one of the the lead on the I creating the IWISE scales.
She was telling me right now right the scoring is just water secure water insecure but they're publishing a paper actually that they've made it into four uh levels which I think will
is a lot more interesting so I it's I think it's something from like low moderate high very high or something so that will be um really useful. I think because you know a score of One Versus you know 11 is still would still be considered in the same category which is not you know not entirely accurate.
So, it would be interesting if we redo this analysis with the with those quadrants.
So, Deborah Rubin posted another question. Are you going to ask? I was just curious about what your next steps would be.
In terms of this research? Yeah. well so for the specific project uh I mean we've given the the project team's like specific recommendations so you know they are part of the project is they are building filtration plants for example
So one thing that we've said is well you know make sure you're properly having community engagement sessions on where the location of these filtration plant should be and make sure that they have ramps so that they're accessible to people with uh disabilities or limited Mobility uh because usually filtration plants here a lot of them are not um accessible.
So, just some of these findings um we're trying to like translate these into practical things at the project level and then for larger advocacy work, we're using this as um kind of a a case study if you will for our government counterparts to show them that you know gender data does matter and it's important because you're learning very different things about community needs when we collect data this way.
So, we're also trying to develop more mechanisms for training people in the government on how to collect this data, how to analyze it. Maybe they could implement the IWISE scale uh or you know other similar tools. We're trying to use this as our kind of jumping board for for larger advocacy efforts.
Great. Thank you again! Thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you Sidra.
We're sharing a short survey in the chat. Pratirakshya is going to put a link in there. As I said your opinion is very important to us.
It really helps us seek funding for speakers and um to you know address interests of the community.
So I wanted to let you know our next event is October 17th. Dr. Brenda Boonabaana will be joining us. She's an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Texas at Austin and She'll be talking about the local meanings of empowerment and lessons for gender in exclusive Agra Food Systems programming in Uganda.
Don't miss this one. It will be virtual as well so you can join via Zoom. You can check our website for more information uh but you can also let us know. It's one of the questions in the survey if you would like to be added to our listserv which we use to announce the discussion series events.
Have a wonderful day and we hope to see many of you again on October 17.
Thanks Maria!! Thank you so much. It was really great. I really appreciate you're joining us. Thank you. Bye Bye. Take care.