Access to water in a Nairobi slum: Women’s work and institutional learning.
Open accessAbstract
This paper describes the ways that households, and particularly women, experience water scarcity in a large informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, through heavy expenditures of time and money, considerable investments in water storage and routinized sequences of deferred household tasks. It then delineates three phases of adaptive water and social engineering undertaken in several informal settlements by the Nairobi Water Company in an ongoing attempt to construct effective municipal institutions and infrastructure to improve residential access to water and loosen the grip that informal vendors may have on the market for water in these localities.
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Women's and girls' bodily integrity has been constrained due to water and sanitation conditions, including limiting bathing and washing, restricting food and water, suppressing defecation and urination urges, delaying changing menstrual materials, and taking anti-diarrheal medicines when lacking sufficient, safe or clean water and sanitation.
“Specifically, women limited bathing and washing hands, clothes, menstrual materials, and bathrooms; [76,86,98,100,123,144,165,197,198,200,202,229,232,281] restricted food and water to avoid defecation and urination; [135, 168, 174, 179, 184, 192, 212, 224] suppressed defecation and urination urges; [2,62,181,184,188,190,191, 214, 217, 229, 235, 236, 238, 241, 247, 248, 250, 270] delayed changing”
From Water, sanitation, and women’s empowerment: A systematic review and qualitative metasynthesis (2022) · cites this paper as [200]
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- Authors
- Crow, B., & Odaba, E.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Santa Cruz (US)
- Corresponding author
- Crow, Ben
- Venue
- Water International
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2010-12-07
- Volume
- 35
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 733-747
- ISSN
- 0250-8060 (ISSN-L)
- 1941-1707
- OpenAlex
- W1551009917
- Cited by
- 55
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 4 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 7 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 3
- FWCI
- 16.53
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.escholarship.org
- Locations
- Water International (publishedVersion)
- Routledge eBooks (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Center for Global, International and Regional Studies
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Water Governance and Infrastructure
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Water Science and Technology › Water Resource Management and Quality
- Social Sciences › Urban Studies › Urban and Rural Development Challenges
- Keywords
- water access, informal settlements, slums, women's employment, water scarcity, household water management, water storage, adaptive water management, social engineering, municipal authorities, water infrastructure, Nairobi
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