30 Years of Innovation and Excellence: GRID-Arendal Annual Report 2019

Illuminating the ways that gender interacts with the environment

UNEP strives to achieve gender equality and incorporate considerations of gender into all of its work to protect our environment, and GRID-Arendal made significant contributions to this effort in 2019. Our team did fieldwork to study the gender dynamics of waste management in three Asian countries and produced a groundbreaking UNEP report, “Gender and Waste Nexus: Experiences from Bhutan, Mongolia and Nepal”, as well as a corresponding policy brief, videos, photos, and other communication products. We collaborated

with the Secretariats of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm (BRS) conventions to publish a “Pocket Guide to the BRS Gender Action Plan”, with guidance for integrating a gender perspective into management of chemicals and waste. And we produced two StoryMaps – multimedia stories with maps, charts, photos, and videos – to elucidate topics addressed in UNEP’s 2016 publication “Global Gender and Environment Outlook”. The StoryMaps tackle the issues of water and sanitation and of consumption and waste as they relate to gender.

KEY NUMBERS

16 million collective number of hours that women spend each day obtaining drinking water in 25 sub-Saharan countries

71

percentage of water-collection burden that is carried by women and girls in sub-Saharan African households without piped water

GRID-Arendal’s Ieva Ručevska conducting research on gender and waste at a dump site in Kathmandu, Nepal.

11