Load shedding perpetuating gender disparity
STHABILE Moyo is an O-level learner sitting for her final examinations at a high school in the high-density suburb of Bulawayo. She stays with her mother who recently got a job as a cook at a City Council owned pre-school and her brother who is in Form Three.
They have been living meagrely. Their mother could not afford a gas stove and they use firewood which she fetches from a nearby forest with other girls in the neighbourhood for cooking and lighting. Sometimes she does her school work revision at the fire outside while cooking.
Her brother Thabo is a happy-go-lucky character who doesn’t do much to help either her mother or her sister in household chores. After his hot sitting session at school in the afternoon, he goes home to eat whatever will be there after which he goes out to play with friends. He has relegated the duty of hewing firewood, cooking, and sometimes looking for water to the two ladies in the house who dutifully do that without complaining.
“I come from school and go to look for water at a borehole with two buckets. I then make a fire and start preparing our supper. If there is no firewood, I go out with others to fetch in the forest on the outskirts of the location. As for Thabo, he only comes home after six in the evening to eat and sleep. He doesn’t do anything to help me, even if he gets home when there is electricity. He says he is a man and can’t be seen helping in women duties. He says his friends will laugh at him,” said Sthabile.
Although every society has roles for both men and women defined on the basis of gender, Sthabile and her family’s gender insensitive life mirrors what is happening in most homes in the country’s urban areas where women and girls have fallen back to the old strictly defined traditional roles of doing all the reproductive or menial jobs at home albeit with very little if any assistance from the man folk.
The patriarchal attitude still lingers stubbornly in the minds of many men and society is not doing enough to debunk the notion that the roles, both productive and reproductive, can be shared equally among all the family members without necessarily looking at gender.
In fact, the stereotypes and branding that men are subjected to by other men like in the case of Thabo being laughed at by his friends for helping do house duties are evident of a society not very close to ending the gap of disparity between men and women and the “catch them young” aphorism seems far from being appreciated by a section of the Zimbabwean community.
The problems that the country is facing in key service delivery such as electricity and water have made the gender gap too glaring to ignore and gender activists concur that patriarchal dominance is a problem that isn’t going to be easy to eradicate in the society. The country has been experiencing acute power shortages, perhaps the most severe in the last decade and talk has been concentrated on the bigger picture — the effects this has on the productive sectors of the economy and investment in particular. Little attention has however, been paid to how lack of electricity and clean water in most of the country’s cities and towns alters the role and perpetuates gender disparities in the home against a backgroundnd of efforts to improve economic and social activity for the traditionally marginalised arginalised groups — women and the girl child through a semblancence of equality.
Both electricity and water are important driverss of sustainable developmentt and their unavailability has serious erious far reaching consequences quences on people’s livelihoodsds and relations in the home. Phases of load shedding have affffected the country’s push for r gender equality and has s impacted negatively on the vulnerable groups of the society as well, widening the gender gap in social and economic circles.
Women and children, particularly the girl child in urban centres, have once again been relegated to traditional duties synonymous with socially backward societies despite most of the women engaged in gainful employment in town and being breadwinners. Gender and women rights practitioner Ms Samukeliso Khumalo said issue of load shedding and water shortages have moved the country back to the olden days of stone age era in terms of societal roles where women in towns are expected to be doing almost everything even after a hard day’s work. She said easy access to energy and water servicservices were expected to enable women to folfollow literacy and numeracy classes, have more leisure time, more access to iinformation through radio and televtelevision making them more aware and empowered and that improvimproved energy services would change the gendered division of labour in the home as it meant that men wwould take up more domestic responsresponsibilities but that was not the case in ZZimbabwe.
“ElectElectricity is the main source of energy for women to meet their practicapractical gender needs in urban sesettings and a serious lack of it as is being experienced in the ccountry meant the alteration of gender roles to the stone age era.
“Our men are not helping the situation either. They have not yet come to the reality as most of them still wait for the women to come back home and cook, clean and iron even when they spend the day at home. This impacts negatively on the participation of women in bigger national issues such as economy, policy and politics. They have a lot of pressures and their natural orientation is that they prioritise others more than themselves when it comes to family,” said Ms Khumalo.
She added that load shedding in urban areas which is also known as demand side management impinges impacts on gender relations and it cascades
onto sustainable socio-economic development.
“Load shedding has seen the role of women being taken aback to where they become hewers of wood for cooking especially that most households cannot afford gas and solar lighting equipment. Its either the woman or the girl child and this has perpetuated gender disparity in our communities. You find that the woman would come home tired from a hard day’s work, get home and start cooking using firewood, she will then wake up in the middle of the night when electricity is back to do the ironing.
“What it means is that she has no time to socialise or for her social circles, she therefore hardly has enough time to sleep and wakes up tired to start a new day and the routine goes on and on,” she said.
As for water, she said, the women and the girl child were affected most. Their access to hygiene is compromised and their time to participate in broader national issues is heavily affected by their need to meet the dual obligation of fulfilling productive and reproductive duties.
Many women already involved in gainful employment therefore endure a double workload schedule as they still have to return home and carry out domestic chores. Ms Khumalo said there was need therefore for society to look into the issue of gender disparity caused by the shortage of electricity and water and find solutions adding that men needed to be conscientised so that they appreciate how the productive and reproductive roles that women play affects their participation effectiveness in broader national issues.
Most local authorities have encountered problems in sourcing spares and material for infrastructural development from abroad due to the illegal sanctions imposed on the country by the West.