Title : The hidden cost of climate adaptation: Valuing unremunerated water work in Kenya gendered response to climate change
Abstract:
Climate change drastically alters rural environments across Sub-Saharan Africa, placing severe, compounding strains on community water security and rural livelihoods. As environmental degradation accelerates and water scarcity intensifies, the operational burden of grassroots climate adaptation falls disproportionately on women and young girls, who are structurally assigned the responsibility of performing unremunerated care work and daily water procurement. This study rigorously investigates and quantifies the hidden economic and social costs of unremunerated water labor within Kenya’s gendered response to environmental shocks. Utilizing a comprehensive mixed-methods research design incorporating household surveys, participatory rural appraisals, hydro-climatic mapping, and field data collection across vulnerable rural communities the analysis applies feminist economic frameworks alongside Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) metrics. This dual approach systematically measures time poverty, physical strain, ergonomic trauma, and chronic health risks associated with extended water procurement journeys during periods of prolonged drought and erratic rainfall. The empirical evidence demonstrates that escalating environmental stress significantly inflates domestic labor requirements, systematically reducing women's economic productivity, livelihood diversification, and income-generating mobility while severely limiting educational access, school retention rates, and academic performance for young girls. Furthermore, current mainstream climate policies routinely overlook these invisible opportunity costs, treating household adaptation as an elastic, free resource without recognizing state or institutional support structures. By integrating gendertransformative climate adaptation models with rigorous social equity metrics, this presentation highlights the critical imperative of recognizing, redistributing, and accounting for unpaid care and water work in national and international environmental policymaking. Ultimately, addressing these structural barriers is vital for achieving sustainable development, true climate justice, and equitable resilience across East Africa.
