This paper describes the ways that households, and particularly women, experience water scarcity in a large informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, through heavy expenditures of time and money, considerable investments in water storage and routinized sequences of defer red household tasks. It then delineates three phases of adaptive water and social engineering undertaken in several informal settlements by the Nairobi Water Company in an ongoing attempt to construct effective municipal institutions and infrastructure to improve residential access to water and loosen the grip that informal vendors may have on the market for water in these localities.

Global statistics suggest that people living in urban areas are more likely than those in rural areas to have access to “improved water sources”. Women do most of the work of water collection in low-income urban areas, as they do in rural areas. In this review of the literature on access to water and women’s work in low-income urban areas of the global south, we find that women’s lives and income-generating opportunities in poor urban communities are profoundly shaped by their inadequate access to water. We identify the main modes of access to water and their possible infl uence on women’s lives. Then, we examine descriptions of women’s lives and the range of diffi culties they face in collecting water (time of access, uncertainty and quality of supply, and costs). We describe some of the advantages (health, improved domestic work, livelihood opportunities, education, and gender relations) reported when communities gain access to safe water at the household level. We conclude that the global figures on improved access to water in urban areas focus only on the technology of access, overlooking social obstacles like the collection time and cost of access, and thus obscuring the wide-ranging social advantages of household water connections.

In this work, we simplify and enhance the visualization currently supported by the UC Atlas Website for mapping global inequality by (i) creating a simple user interface, (ii) supporting time series animation of global maps, and (iii) simplifying and integrating theline graphs, bar graphs, and ranked bar graphs. The visualization system is accessible at http://atlas-dev.ucsc.edu/ian. Our vision is to enhance the visualization system by adding additional types of charts including scatter plots, star plots, parallel coordinates, and small multiples visualization while keeping the user interface simple and integrated.

In this work, our objective is to visualize the relationship between the variables that impact health in a global context. Recently, Cornia et al. [1] have proposed five main determinants of global health – material deprivation, progress in health technology, acute psychosocial stress, unhealthy lifestyle, and income inequality etc. Results of regression analysis worldwide indicate that almost 90% of the variation in health can be attributed to twelve variables representing these five determinants. We compute correlations between the health variables and its determinants and apply a visualization tool [2] to display these correlations globally and at country level in order to gain a better understanding. We observe that the country-level results obtained through easy-to-understand graphs and simple correlation analysis pose an anomaly to the worldwide regression results and require further analysis to close the gap between correlation and regression analysis and the gap between the country-level and global-level analysis.