Water Induced Mobilities: Exploratory research into water fetching practices in peri-urban Zimbabwe

Water-fetching trips are the journeys people make each day to collect water from outside their homes. Around 2.1 billion people do this globally. 

In 80% of households without reliable water, women and girls do most of this work, especially in peri-urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa that miss out on both rural aid and city water systems. These trips are similar to other daily journeys, like going to school, work, or health service-regular, repeated movements through space and time. Yet they are rarely studied in transport geography and mobility research. 

Studies on climate, infrastructure, and gender have examined these trips, but none has treated them as a form of everyday mobility in their own right. This study helps fill that gap by treating water fetching as a type of everyday mobility and linking it to debates on care work, infrastructure, and transport. It focuses on two peri-urban settlements in Southlea Park in Harare and Cowdray Park in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Both were created under state resettlement programmes in 2005 and, nearly twenty years later, many households there still do not have piped water at home. Because of this, women and girls often walk every day to collect water from community boreholes, wells, and nearby streams, carrying heavy containers back to their homes. These walks are not only hard physical work. They are also social times when women talk, share news, organise help, and build a sense of belonging with others in the settlement. In this way, water-fetching trips both meet basic needs and help create social identities and community bonds among the women who make them. 

Using in-depth interviews with households in Southlea Park and Cowdray Park, and key informant interviews with municipal officials, NGOs, and academic experts, the project will show how these water journeys shape daily life, chances to move, and access to urban infrastructure.