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Back to SearchThe Water for Women Fund is Australia’s flagship Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) program in Asia and the Pacific. The Australian Government has long recognised that improvements in WASH are critical for addressing poverty and for human and economic development. Women disproportionally bear the burden of inadequate WASH infrastructure in many developing countries. Women also have specific knowledge, abilities and rights that need to be taken into account in WASH programs.
Over the next five years, Water for Women will help deliver on the promise of better access to WASH services, gender equality and women’s wellbeing, voice, leadership and economic empowerment. GHD has been selected as managing contractor for the Fund, acting as the Fund Coordinator.
Social inclusion is an integral part of the Fund. It ensures thatgender and other dimensions of inequality are addressed as fundamental to the WASH process at every stage and every level. The use of explicit gender and socially inclusive approaches in the Fund’s design is regarded in the WASH sector as progressive, innovative and an important contribution to regional and global policy and practice. The Fund will aim not only to ‘add women and other groups and stir’, but will acknowledge and embrace the social transformation that results when genuine shifts in voice and power are achieved.
Water for Women will be implemented in partnership with Australian and international civil society organisations, in 16 countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In total, there will be 19 projects delivered by 10 civil society partners between now and 2023.
On behalf of the Australian Government and our partner civil society organisations, the Water for Women Fund Coordinator wishes a Happy International Women’s Day to our partners, our stakeholders, to people living in the communities where we will be working, and to supporters of gender equality and social inclusion in Australia, across the region and the world.