University of Washington professor receives grant to study how women's time use is affected by a Water 1st-funded water project

We often talk about the difficult and time-intensive task of water collection, a task that largely falls on the backs of women and young girls. Our projects beneficiaries usually tell us this is their primary motivator for participating in a water project. But understanding how water projects actually affect household time use is largely missing from academic research.

A University of Washington Evans School professor, Joseph Cook, was recently awarded a grant from the competitive UW Royalty Research Fund to provide this missing evidence. The proposed research would study how time use by our project participants in rural Ethiopia changes as a result of improved water access.

The impacts of a water project are immediate and direct: people spend less time collecting water. There can also be indirect impacts. If people are drinking safe water, using toilets, and using more water for improved hygiene practices, like washing their hands, we expect them to experience less illness. The resulting reductions in disease mean that parents spend less time tending to sick children. Other indirect impacts are increases in work days, school attendance, and leisure time.

Unlike previous studies, the UW research design will examine both direct and indirect time savings, and observe changes in intra-household time allocation, in order to see how work is re-allocated among household members.

Water 1st started collaborating with UW on this research in 2008 when Water 1st Advisory Council member Mary Kay Gugerty and UW student, Travis Reynolds, performed a literature review, convincing us of the need to pursue this topic further. Dr. Cook and two Evans School students, Yuta Masada and Lea Fortmann, have already been working hard to continue this study.

During July and August of 2009, they collected baseline data (as volunteers) in Bishikiltu and Tuta Kunche, two villages where Water 1st and our local partner organization, Water Action, are working in rural Ethiopia. The UW-funded study will continue in these communities during the summer of 2010.

Water 1st also wants to recognize supporter Karen Nilson and Water 1st board members, Sara DeRuyck and Anne-Marie Amies Oelschlager, who traveled to Ethiopia with us in 2009 to help help test various survey tools. Karen continues to volunteer in this study doing the tedious work of entering survey data into a database for analysis.

In addition to helping us understand how the projects we are funding affect time use of our beneficiaries, Dr. Cook hopes that a better understanding of the relationships between successful water projects and household time use may also help the aid community understand the potential impacts of other types of interventions which save time or labor in rural sub-Saharan Africa, like alternative cooking fuel sources to reduce firewood gathering or devices to more efficiently irrigate fields.