Unpacking female everyday water practices: the uneven waterscapes of Lagos’s slum communities

Although it is widely acknowledged that women in the global South and more specifically, in urban Africa, play a central role in providing and storing water, a gendered approach to everyday water practices remains rare. Drawing from field work in five slum communities in Lagos, the research analyses the enormous daily struggle of female slum dwellers, mostly poor, in obtaining water for their households. Water supply infrastructure by the government is faulty, not maintained and/or non-existent. Power in everyday water practices is held by the male; the informally implemented and managed water infrastructure is almost exclusively run by men, and within the household, the men, if/when around, claim the right to use water first. The paper traces the everyday water practices of female slum dwellers within the prevailing water scarcity and economic limitations, re/produced by their social position. The way out of Lagos’s water crisis is a nuanced, gendered approach to water supply. The paper concludes with recommendations on how this can be achieved. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .