What can we learn about women’s empowerment in water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) in Malawi? Findings from the new Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH)

Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH)-related challenges around the world can negatively affect communities and individuals, but people in resource-constrained areas face additional obstacles in preventing and recovering from the consequences of inadequate WASH infrastructure. WASH interventions in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) often target women as key actors for achieving project outcomes and many aim to improve the quality of women’s lives; fewer, however, have a specific focus on empowering women. A systematic review concluded that studies within the WASH sector have rarely focused specifically on empowering women, despite efforts to reach and benefit them (Caruso et al. 2022). In a review of gender-sensitive WASH indicators that have been used in the peer-reviewed literature, gray literature, and toolkits from organizations operating in WASH, only around 10% of the 162 indicators identified specifically measured empowerment. Given the limitations of previous approaches to measuring WASH-related empowerment, we recently developed a Women’s Empowerment metric for WASH (WE-WASH), a suite of indicators to measure women’s and men’s agency in the WASH sector, based on data collected in Malawi and Nepal. This project note first provides some context for the Malawi study, then describes our overall approach to developing the WE-WASH indicators and summarizes the implementation of the WE-WASH question naire, and then presents some key findings emerging from Malawi.