Worldwide Water Education

January 6, 2012

Water School for Men

Last fall, Project WET staff received an email from the World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) announcing its first-ever contest to suggest ideas for its popular Cartoon Calendar. Winning ideas would be developed into cartoons and included in the 2012 calendar.

As WSP says,"Living without access to clean water or sanitation is no joke, but humor can also touch on complex and often sensitive issues." Produced since 2002, the annual Cartoon Calendar raises awareness around WASH issues and is widely distributed in the WASH community. The 2012 theme was Gender in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, so the contest asked people to consider water and sanitation challenges from a gender perspective to call attention to some of the inequalities that cause women and girls to be disproportionately affected by failures in water and sanitation services.

Enthusiastic about the topic, LAC Project Manager Julia Nelson, International Projects Assistant Morgan Perlson and Communication Specialist Nicole Rosenleaf Ritter sat down to brainstorm ways to make a serious point about water and gender in a humorous way. Ultimately we settled on the idea of a "Water School for Men," submitting the following short description to WSP as our contest entry:

Since women are disproportionately burdened with the task of procuring water, our idea is to depict a classroom in which eager men take "lessons" from women about water: how to carry water without spilling it, how to teach themselves to read while they are walking to find water, how to carry water and a child at the same time, how to avoid being attacked while they fetch water, etc. The role reversal would highlight a few of the many problems that women face due to the cultural expectation that they will find and fetch water for their families.

To our delight, we received word yesterday that our "Water School for Men" idea was one of three chosen for inclusion in the 2012 calendar, occupying the February spot:

"Our" cartoon was developed by Frank Odoi, an award-winning cartoon artist living in Kenya. Mr. Odoi's work is currently being published in Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and the United Kingdom, and he was Kenya's Cartoonist of the Year in 1985, 1986, 2004 and Best strip Cartoonist in 2008 as well as the 2005 Cartoonist of the Year in Ghana.

Thanks to WSP for producing this excellent and fun resource.