The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), The Asia Foundation (TAF), and Winrock are collaborating on a project to integrate gender and poverty considerations with water security planning. Focused on the Stung Chinit basin in Cambodia, this project will create a poverty framework for the region and incorporate it into a water resources model using SEI’s Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) software.
This work seeks to explore how sustainable water management can happen in tandem with efforts to achieve social equality, economic growth, and poverty reduction – and thus ensure access to water for all. It will feed into an ongoing effort under the USAID Sustainable Water Partnership to improve water security in Stung Chinit lead by Winrock.
The analysis will use the Dimensions of Poverty Framework developed by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) to characterize poverty dimensions and gender inequalities, describe the contexts surrounding poverty and incorporate these aspects in a water resources model for the Stung Chinit basin. The work of this project will be based on four tasks. First, a literature review (LT) of the characteristics and challenges related to watershed management, poverty alleviation, and relevant gender and social equality aspects. Second, ten key informants interviews (KII), five at the local level in the province of Kampong Thom and five at the national level in Phnom Penh to understand the linkages of water, poverty, inequality, and gender. Third, a HouseHold Survey (HHS) informed by the input from the LT and the KIIs to assess the research questions and statistical correlations between water security, poverty, and social equality. Finally, the input from the HHS serves as a mechanism to obtain more information in order to refine and disaggregate the WEAP model to i) have a better representation of the base case model, ii) potentially, evaluate dynamically the impacts on social aspects in the future planning scenario analysis focused on water security.
