The Water for ALL project helped to build sustainable capacity in achieving equity and entitlement in accessing water. Professor Jafry led the project, working with the Centre for Social Research at the University of Malawi and the University of Lusaka. Over the past five years, the Scottish Government’s Climate Justice Fund has already invested £6 million for projects in sub-Saharan African countries. In Malawi, for example, around 30,000 people now have access to safe clean drinking water and over 100 committees have been trained in natural resources rights and management.

This project shared knowledge to support these national policies and strategies on water and the governments’ gender policies by addressing some of the challenges and bottlenecks through a climate justice framework.

Deep rooted issues

A climate justice framework analysis was designed and conducted both in Zambia and Malawi to determine whether human rights, social justice, equity and equality, vulnerability and climate change indicators feature in any of the approaches to water resource management. The research in Zambia and Malawi suggested that inequalities regarding access to water are deeply rooted in cultural and gendered inequalities and power structures.

Challenging such deep-seated social inequalities will require not only a collective voice but also demands for dignity, compassion and solidarity with Combating climate change impacts the aim of reducing deeper forms of intersecting inequalities. The team also found that communities are becoming more aware of the relationship between erratic weather patterns and climate change but they generally do not understand why this is happening nor how to respond; communities are ‘forced’ to exploit their local natural environment for survival thus provoking climate change and water scarcity; and women and girls continue to be distanced from accessing education due to their role in the provision of water and this is becoming more challenging due to climate change

GCU’s work through the Centre for Climate Justice is also supported by the most accessible database of climate justice research. Created in partnership with the Mary Robinson Foundation, the GCU climate justice research repository is the first single portal through which good quality information and knowledge-based research can be accessed on the climate change agenda and in particular its social and economic impacts in developing countries.