NEWSHUMAN RIGHTS AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Helene Gayle is part of Change.org's Changemaker network, a network comprised of leading voices for social change. This post was submitted especially for Blog Action Day 2010.

For women around the world, we all know juggling our careers, families and friends can be a struggle. But for Ellema Sorra, age 25 living in Ethiopia “There is no free space. Wherever I go, there’s a job to be done,” she says. Between raising four children and a host of other duties, it's no wonder. In addition to cooking, she milks the cows twice a day and walks two to three hours every day to fetch water from a nearby town.

Having access to clean drinking water and a toilet and practicing good hygiene can make all of the difference in a woman’s or a young girl’s life. At CARE, we focus our efforts on empowering women and girls in the poorest parts of the world and we know that impacting even a single one of them, can send a ripple effect through their entire community.

For Ellema, receiving training on water and sanitation from CARE was just the spark she needed.  She gathered five women and convinced them to help her build the village’s first latrine.  After a week of digging, they finished the job. “I decided I should be the model in my village so I took the initiative first,” Ellema said.  Now, 8 of the 12 villages in her community have built their own latrines.  The elders have even created bylaws encouraging people to use them.

We know that lack of access to safe water and sanitation is the biggest killer of children under the age of five in sub-Saharan Africa. What’s less known is that clean water and the ability to wash hands boosts school attendance for girls and can even bolster self esteem and dignity.  Women and girls in Ethiopia who have access to a hand washing station or latrine were three to five times more likely to see themselves as having greater equality in their household.

Without it they’d be in the dark. With it, their food production system buckles. This is the dilemma the Toubul village has to endure at the foot of a dam in the northern Indian state of Manipur.

As in many cases of development gone wrong, the hydropower dam fuels the region with electricity. Because of it, a few roads were also built. But instead of paving the way to responsible industrialization, the dam has severely endangered the livelihoods of Toubul’s families.

According to an article at Infochange, the major setback for this agricultural community is the floods caused on the village’s arable land. To keep the dam operational, the adjacent Loktak Lake is kept at levels that inundate a total of 80,000 hectares of land, according to the Loktak Lake Affected Areas Peoples’ Action Committee.

But it does not stop there.