Women’s empowerment can be advanced through leadership of, and involvement in water enterprises, as evidenced by this study, however, gender norms constrained women, especially with respect to mobility (leaving the home for extended periods), and household and family duties impacting on income-generating work or vice versa. As such, targeted strategies are needed by a range of actors to address such constraints.
The findings of this study can assist NGOs, donors and governments incentivizing entrepreneurship in water services, to ensure that these interventions are not gender blind, and to draw on evidence of the barriers and enablers for female entrepreneurs and how these are influenced by contextualized gender norms.
The findings are particularly relevant for civil society organisations and donors who are funding and delivering small scale piped water systems and are actively seeking women and families to own and operate these systems. Where governments are not serving communities with WASH, other actors are stepping in, such as family businesses, community groups, NGOs and enterprises. There are risks associated with decentralised systems that are not subject to oversight or governance measures, not only for communities, but for the entrepreneurs and community groups themselves. Assuming empowerment outcomes from entrepreneurship may put women and families at financial risk, which makes research such as this important, because it asked women managing piped water systems what the barriers and enablers were for their schemes. While the research was limited to Cambodia, it has significance especially for other contexts such as Viet Nam, India, Lao PDR, Indonesia and African contexts that are adopting and promoting small-scale enterprises in WASH.