About the Water+ Theory of Change (Working Draft)

In Few Words

The Water+[1] Theory of Change is a declaration of vision and purpose. It is our guide for creating more profound change in people’s lives by increasing the benefit of water in multiple spheres: beyond the availability of clean water, CAREwill boost the ability of a girl to complete school, the health of a newborn, the availability of small scale irrigation services to a farmer. We are also concerned with how human uses of water fit within ecosystems that benefit both people’s immediate needs and their long-term relationship with their environment. Through our theory of change, we call attention to the inequities faced by poor women and girls regarding water resources and challenge the governance and societal structures and beliefs that would perpetuate these injustices. Above all, our theory of change recognizes poor women and girls as powerful in their ability to transform their lives and provoke reform in their communities. We support them in their mission.

This document explains the different components of the Theory of Change and accompanies its full graphical depiction.

The Goal

Poor women and school-aged girls are both uniquely vulnerable and uniquely powerful. CARE is committed to gender equity in order to uphold the rights of women and girls to enjoy equal access along with men and boys to the opportunities, resources, and goods that are their birthright. Sadly, equal opportunity is usually not the case and women and girls are consistently among the most marginalized around the world.

From the standpoint of ending extreme poverty, it is also important to pay special attention to empowering women and girls. Evidence shows that investments made in women and girls spread out to other areas, such as the improved health and livelihoods of their current and future families. The same approaches, when tried with men and boys, do not always yield similar results.

These arguments are just as valid for the water+ sector. The UN has now declared water as a human right, with good cause. Poor people often cite lack of access to water as one of their most serious obstacles. None are more affected than women and girls who often make the largest sacrifice in terms of time, effort and lost opportunities when there is limited access to safe water and proper sanitation. At the same time, because of their close involvement with water and sanitation, women are the most ardent champions and committed managers of water+ resources.

The Hypothesis

This Theory of Change is fundamentally a speculation, but one that is based on CARE’s best models of development and empowerment as well as decades of experience in water+. The domains (boxes) of the Theory and Change are meant to work in conjunction and concurrently, with a good deal of overlap expected. Though the envisioned change is an organic and somewhat unpredictable process, this simplified visualization anticipates that some domains (first two boxes) increase impact when added up, while others (the third box) exponentially increase, or multiply that effect.

The words catalyst, enabler, driver and goal, are used to distinguish each domain, though as mentioned, there is significant overlap.

Catalyst / Enabler / Driver / Goal
Access provides immediate health benefits, improves livelihoods and security,saves time, builds cooperation, and provides opportunities for people to stretch their capabilities and challenge their thinking. / Changes in decision-making bodies, laws and norms create new expectations around behavioral changes needed to expand and secure the gains made through improved access. The equal rights of women to water as a productive resource are upheld. / Womenfind that since the business of water and sanitation is relegated to them, they have considerable scope within water+ interventions to create changes at household and community level. It becomes clear that their participation is vital for change. Girls are no longer handicapped by poor WASH services at school and they are able to participate in their education with increased confidence. / Women and girls gain—hours saved trekking for water, more time at school and better health for the whole family. But also, they gain a belief in themselves and their abilities that transcendsany one water+ intervention.
A True Story
Ellema attends training on sanitation and hygiene provided by CARE and partners along with local government health officials. She returns to her village inspired to stop open defecation andprotect drinking water. / She asks the village chairman to organize an educational meeting where she explains to her fellow community members the importance of environmental sanitation and the benefits of building latrines. The elders of the village eventually pass bylaws fining those who don’t use latrines, thus setting the stage for wider change. / Ellema gathers five women and has a discussion with them about improving sanitation. After a week of digging, they complete their first latrine. Once sanitation in the village has been improved, the group, now expanded to 21 women, then moves on to tackling the water situation. They decide to diga rainwater harvesting cistern and seek support from CARE and other NGOs. They receive technical support and borrow tools from nearby projects. With the help of male relatives the women complete the job and start saving for a tarp to cover the cistern. / With a volume of 81 cubic meters, the cistern, when sealed properly, will provide a valuable source of water for much of the dry season. Ellema, the other women, and their families will likelyenjoy better health and time savings that can be invested in other areas, such as livelihoods and education. Theywill have witnessed the power of their own decisions and actions.

The Domains: Working across Sectors

Although a domain demarcates a particular sphere of action, e.g. service delivery versus policy, each of the domains of change can be a cross-sectoral, integrated intervention cutting across health, education, natural resource management, and livelihoods.

/ Secure and sustainable access to water+ services
The water point, be it a hand pump or a well, is one of the most visible and iconic aspects of improved access to water+ services. Not surprisingly, therefore, access has traditionally been thought of as an issue of appropriate technology. While finding the right low-cost, durable and context appropriate technology is very important, it is a challenge that is dwarfed by the issue of sustainability.
In addition, too often technological solutions are not well adapted to the special needs of women and girls in both household and school interventions and their need for equitable access to water for productive purposes, nor do the interventions fully engage them as champions and change-makers.
It is time to challenge our conventional approaches to sustainability. Many of our projects focus on putting in place or supporting structures of accountability, such as water user committees and local government, with well understood roles and responsibilities. However, it often takes a mix of factors to ensure sustainability. In addition to accountability structures, these might include profit incentives for private providers, and a supportive environment for service provision, such as supply chains and access to good data for monitoring and marketing. Whether through micro-credit or effective monitoring techniques to detect interruptions in service, we must be broad-based and creative in our approach to sustainability.
Water resources must be managed in a way that does no harm to the environment while equipping people to deal with the effects of climate change. Gender- sensitive maintenance of water resources starts with better consultation and more meaningful involvement of women and girls in water+ projects and programs, both in terms of access to water for domestic and for productive use. This is important for two reasons. First, findings suggest the provision of WASH services can have a significant impact on women’s sense of dignity, empowerment, and equality, particularly when women are involved in the management of the intervention[2].
Secondly, better consultation and involvement typically makes interventions more effective. This may result in modifications to hardware related to cooking, or bathing, or latrine or water points placement that improve security for women and girls, who often risk attack and harassment on their way to get water. Similarly in schools, consultation can lead to optimal interventions, such as latrines and washrooms designed by girls to help them manage menstruation.
/ Gender-sensitive Water+ policies, institutions & social norms
Though solutions to the problems of access and coverage vary according to geography, topography and many other factors, they cannot be effectively addressed without comprehensive national policies that help create incentives for service providers, build infrastructure, manage watersheds, and regulate access.
Such policies are far too often absent, ineffective, or poorly implemented. They are not gender-sensitive in that they do not adequately address the linkages between gender equity and access to water; in addition, many policies are not effectively integrated with related policies, such as health, and environmental protection. In cases where good policies exist, change often never makes it off the pages and into real life. Community governance structures are the authority that matters for most of our target populations and these adjudicate on the basis of traditions and social norms that may have nothing to do with national policy.
CARE and partners can work with government to ensure effective management of watersheds at basin level through an integrated water resource management approach that ensures good governance at all levels to decide how water is to be used and managed. Through advocacy efforts and through their participation in water and land decision-making bodies, inequities regarding women’s ownership of and entitlement to land and water as productive resources must be challenged.
Climate change is more starkly delineatingthe links between human activity, health and livelihoods, and the environment, groundwater depletion and air and water pollution. Therefore water policies should be ecologically sustainable and well integrated in concept and implementation with policies governing natural resource use, knowledge sharing regarding environmental best practice, and economic activity.
CARE and partners should seek to challenge and persuade local authorities to re-examine norms regarding gender-roles and entitlements and overall hygiene and sanitation practice. For example, school health clubs can be used as an opportunity to discuss and change attitudes regarding gender roles around WASH.
National policies are also important to ensuregender-sensitive school WASH provisionat scale. They can create, fund, and support systems for provision of clean latrines and safe water for drinking and handwashing for all students, with special considerations for the needs of girls. An example of this is in the area of menstrual management, a topic that most WASH interventions hardly attempt to address although it affects everything from girls’ self esteem to whether they stay in school or not. National policies can mandate the provision of washrooms and other facilities that provide girls private spaces to change and maintain cleanliness and allocate funds to schools for sanitary pads.
/ Gender-equitable control over Water+ services
Though often disproportionately disadvantaged by poor access to water+ services, paradoxically, women and girls can wield great influence when given control over these same services.As mothers and home-makers, women have long been targeted as the most important members for promoting health and hygiene-related behavior changes, such as treating drinking water, practicing handwashing, or eliminating open defecation.
However, women are also farmers, investors, pastoralists, entrepreneurs, horticulturalists. In most cases, they are contributors to the household livelihood; in many, they are the sole breadwinner. Because water is usually linked to these other roles, women’s self actualization, economic welfare, and sense of control over their destinies are tied to their ability to have fair access to water as a productive resource. Yet frequently women are denied control or ownership over water as a resource as it is often tied to land ownership, customarily a male entitlement, and because men’s access is prioritized in times of water scarcity.
In addition, on a day-to-day basis, the demands of fetching water can severely curtail women’s pursuit of livelihood activities and skills building and their social and political involvement in activities beyond the home.
Women’s needs and interest in terms of health, sanitation, and livelihoods are different from men’s and their unique perspectives must be considered and addressed.
Men and women, both in individual households and at communal level, can and should be encouraged to collectively examine these issues of equity. There should be safe spaces to voice their views regarding who gets access to water, who manages it, and whether gender roles relating to water and sanitation are equitable. CARE can play a role in facilitating dialogue with village leadership or district officials, national policy leaders or household members about how gender expectations can be more equitable.
Women should be encouraged to think of themselves as influential and take up roles in decision-making and maintenance bodies such as water user associations, and watershed governance bodies.A change in mindset is required on both the part of implementing organizations such as CARE, and the women themselves. It is the women who must see themselves as architects of their reality, rather than as a recipient of services. CARE and partners must treat them as such.
Girls too stand to gain. It has been proven that having access to safe water and the ability to wash their hands can go a long way in keeping girls in school[3]. Interventions should also strive to boost girls’ leadership skills, such as through leadership roles in school health clubs. Boys should be engaged in these changes, for example, throughinvolvement in keeping latrines clean and discussions on respecting girls’ biological differences.

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[1] Water+ is our term for an approach that encompasses our traditional work with drinking water provision, sanitation and hygiene along with productive uses of water (such as irrigation), and ecologically sustainable water resource management.

[2]Research into Women’s experiences and their empowerment through a WASH intervention, CARE 2010.

[3] Preliminary impact findings from the SWASH+ Project ( show that the provision of handwashing water and treated drinking water can substantially reduce girls’ absenteeism.