Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: Gender in some specific environmental matters

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Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Gender in some
specific environmental matters

• Presented by
• Huynh Thu Nha Trang
• Jan, 2005.

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Outline

• Situation of women in the city
• Some UEM-related projects in the city
• Gender issues in the three sub-sectors
• water and sanitation
• solid waste management
• air pollution
• Remarked points

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(No Transcript)
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Situation of women in the city
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Education _ male priority

• Womens education is more constrained than that
  of men
• their workload
• male preference
• There is still son preference. A son will
  stay with his parents, but a daughter will move
  to her husband after marriage. Therefore, we
  should invest more on son than on daughter.
  Completing high school is enough for a daughter,
  but it is necessary for a son to enter a
  university by all means.

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Education _ male priority

• Low-educated women lack of confidence and often
  isolate themselves from several activities even
  if they have long experience in that regard.
• Males seem to dominate all the participation of
  the community, such like in an urban upgrading
  project.

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Intra-household gender relations

• Men are predominant in making decision than women
  
• I play both mother and father roles. However,
  its my husband who decide important thing in my
  family for example buying motorbike for him some
  time ago, and television afterwards
• The willingness to respect their husband
  unconditionally therefore reinforces the
  inequality in decision-making power between women
  and men within households.

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Health preservation for mothers and children
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Organizations working on womens issues

• Women Union
• to help bringing up the status of women in the
  society, and support them in all the fields of
  life, such as finance, education, jobs, health
  and security
• INGOs Action Aid , The Asia Foundation, etc
• NGOs

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Some UEM-related projects in the city
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• The Urban Upgrading Sub-Project which is part of
  the Vietnam Urban Upgrading project
• The construction of the country's largest
  wastewater treatment plant in Binh Chanh
  District's Binh Hung Commune
• The Ho Chi Minh City Environmental Sanitation
  Project
• WU funding for building standardized latrine

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Gender issues in the three sub-sectors
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Water and Sanitation (1)

• The total of water supply of all sources was only
  about 900,000m3 per day
• 53 kilometers of canals and ditches blocked with
  black stinking water with full of mud and garbage
  and many localities become flooded after the
  rains
• In the family, women have been found to be the
  one in charge of water management and family
  sanitary.

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(2) Phuoc Kien Commune, Nha Be District

• Trucks with water tanks coming because there is
  no hydraulic power water system
• Having jars for collecting rainwater
• Using rainwater for eating and drinking
• Mosquito larva
• Not aware of the risk of using unsafe water

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(3) Phuoc Kien Commune, Nha Be District

• Case of Mrs. D
• Selling breakfast food, raising 4 children
  without husband
• Remarkable expense for water
• Using her mothers latrine
• Case of Mrs. C
• Hired labor, living near the riverbank, often
  soaking under water and mud, then getting smelled
  leucorrhoea
• No electricity and water in the house
• Using river as a big recycle bin its water for
  washing

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(4) Binh Hung Commune, Binh Chanh District

• Case of Mrs. N
• Water source is major from rain
• Washing and cleaning have been done by using
  river water
• The latrine is also constructed not so far from
  the washing place

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Solid Waste Management (1)

• Fixing garbage in the ground or burning it in the
  back of her house throwing garbage away in utter
  disorder near the canals
• Recycling industry
• Half of the 10, 000 people employed in this
  industry was women, including 4,500 itinerant
  buyers, and 500 shopkeepers
• Women also represented 40 of workers in
  recycling factories

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(2) Ve chai mobile purchasing

• Objective of this activity is to exploit all
  available sources of wasted materials.
• Instruments including just a bamboo frame, a
  portable scale or clock scale, and a small daily
  capital
• Women from poor labor class, living in the same
  hamlet, working under hard conditions

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(3) Ve chai mobile purchasing

• Walking on foot around the streets
• Meeting someone wishing to sell wasted things,
  classifying, scaling, counting things
  estimating the price
• Business art
• Reselling things to junk shops
• Improving waste recycling ?

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Air Pollution (1)

• Level of pollution was often 1.73 3.73 times
  higher than the Vietnamese Standard
• Within only 2 groups of quarter 3 in ward 9, Tan
  Binh district, there was 50 chimneys of weaving
  and dying factories
• In some traffic knots, the atmosphere always
  seems to be suffocating with too much vehicles
  smoke.
• Most of resident in this area has got sinusitis
  because they have been inspired a lot of harmful
  wasted air. In addition, hundreds of sand trucks
  spill sand everywhere on the road. Then, when
  other vehicles go through this intersection, the
  atmosphere is full of dust and sand

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Air Pollution (2)

• Hygiene workers
• Women are street cleaners, therefore, seem to
  take the higher risk of air pollution
• Being equipped with gauze masks
• Knowing that they could get occupational
  diseases, including respiratory ones
• Street vendors
• Women 90
• Awareness of getting diseases from air pollution
  is relatively low

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Air Pollution (3)

• Guideline for handling environmental pollution in
  small-scale industry production most of the
  small-scale industries did not know anything
  about this helpful booklet.
• No special attention to mitigate the impact of
  air pollution on womens health

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Remarked points
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• Bad hygienic conditions, poor water and air lead
  to many diseases and to the death of many people,
  especially women and children
• to generate conditions and opportunities for
  women to study, enjoy cultural activities, have
  access to information, and grasp knowledge of the
  environmental protection
• Women are participating in greening the
  environment, planting trees and forests, covering
  bare hills with vegetation, helping to prevent
  erosion, drought and flood, and in the
  purification of the environment
• to train women and provide them methods to
  protect the environment, since they themselves
  will practice those methods, help guiding their
  children and family members to practice them and
  pass on those methods in their villages and towns

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Thank you!