Q&A About Gender, Violence And Pollution With Janet Kabeberi-Macharia

25th November marks the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and the start of the global campaign “16-Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence”.

Janet Kabeberi-Macharia, Senior Gender Advisor and Head of the Gender and Safeguards Unit at United Nations Environment Program, explains that she finds it unsettling that the intersection of the gender and environment issues are still not perceived as 'mainstream', when they are nothing but.

"It’s all about 'people and planet', and 'leave no one behind', the two cornerstones of the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development. In the rural areas of the developing world, it is usually women and girls who walk long distances to collect water and firewood. Due to environmental degradation, they are walking longer distances to unfamiliar territories, exposing them to higher risks of sexual violence," she says.

She believes gender-based violence is a very relevant theme to pollution and other environmental themes.

"Water pollution is an integral part of environmental degradation, which exposes women and girls to violence on their journeys to water collection points. A survey in 25 Sub-Saharan Africa reveals that women spend a total of 16 million hours per day collecting water, while men spend 6 million hours. Another example is about women’s and girls’ gender roles with firewood, which poses double burdens to them. Depletion of forest resources causes women and girls to walk farther to collect firewood for household energy consumption, exposing them to violence. Coming back home, most often, it is the role of women to burn firewood for cooking, exposing them to indoor air pollution, which kills 4.3 million people."

Beating pollution will first require beating violence.