#7 Final thoughts

Alas, my final blog post is here

As my blog comes to an end after a very eye-opening couple of months, I want to echo back to my first post where I talked about writing about Africa. When listening to the IRC WASH's global talk on 'Decolonising WASH sector knowledge and decolonising systems thinking' for my university course, I was again reminded of the fact that narratives influence change (see Figure 2). And yet I have probably perpetuated some of the negative tropes about Africa over the course of my blog. This is why I invite you to take my posts with a pinch of salt and mistrust some of my resources, because I have been heavily reliant on information from more questionable and arguably neocolonialist organisations like UNICEF, the World Bank and WHO amongst others. Unfortunately, however, these are the most accessible and powerful sources. 

Additionally, in this blog I have predominantly focused on the needs and challenges of women instead of men's, and that is because a gendered water management analysis ought to focus on the gender that is most affected by it. Hopefully we can now understand that while yes, places all across Africa have life-threatening WASH issues for men and women, the problems and in particular the solutions are not as pessimistic as we are told. Nor are they as one-dimensional as we are told.