Carrying the Shortage: Pregnant Women Shoulder Zimbabwe’s Water Crisis

As rural water sources dwindle, families compensate with longer journeys and borrowed transport. For pregnant women, the burden can continue after the water reaches home.

By Tendai Makaripe

Six months pregnant, Sally Mutengo fetches water from a river four to five kilometres from her home, then limits her own washing so there is enough for cooking and cleaning her husband’s clothes.

Her nine-year-old daughter helps, but cannot carry much.

Sometimes a neighbour lends Mutengo a wheelbarrow. Sometimes people collecting water with scotch carts offer assistance.

When neither is available, she must manage without that help.

“I am the one who should be fetching the water; it’s part of my roles as a woman,” she said.

Mutengo lives in Village 14 in Romsley, about 60 kilometres from Nyazura, under Chief Chiduku. Residents say the Singwizi River, on which they depend, is drying up.

She says she usually makes three or four collection trips a day, taking a 20-litre container, with transport depending on the assistance available.

Yet securing water does not end the shortage. At home, she must decide how much she can use for herself.

Her experience exposes a cost of water scarcity that infrastructure counts can miss: households keep functioning because someone undertakes additional work or leaves personal needs unmet.

Interviews in Romsley and Buhera show pregnant women circumnavigating shortages through borrowed transport, family assistance and rationing. The arrangements differ, but each transfers part of the work of maintaining supply into the household.

As Zimbabwe prepares for another potentially dry season, the question is whether water provision reduces that burden or leaves families to carry it.

A shortage that follows women home

In Romsley’s villages 13 and 14, residents say people and livestock are competing for dwindling water in the Singwizi.

“We are in a fix here if it doesn’t rain,” said Salan Chigarisano, a Village 14 resident.

Village head Takudzwa Mugwenhi said the community was seeking assistance, particularly for women struggling to obtain water.

“Unfortunately, so far we haven’t received much help, but I know it will come,” he said.

The concern has a wider environmental backdrop.

Zimbabwe’s Meteorological Services Department’s 2026/27 seasonal outlook projects increased chances of below-normal rainfall, alongside warmer-than-normal temperatures during October to December.

The outlook describes probabilities, not a guaranteed drought in every village. It nevertheless gives communities reason to prepare before existing shortages worsen.

For Mutengo, preparedness has an immediate meaning: being able to obtain enough water without depending on whether a neighbour can spare transport.

Her account also reveals how household expectations influence what happens after collection.

She says she cannot use all the available water for personal hygiene while leaving insufficient supplies for cooking and washing her husband’s clothes.

That is not evidence that every household distributes water or work in the same way. It is evidence that, in hers, pregnancy has not removed the responsibility she associates with being a woman.

Research involving other rural Zimbabwean communities helps explain that pressure.

In their 2025 study, “If we have water, we have money”: A qualitative investigation of the role of water in women’s economic engagement in Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, Emily Ogutu and colleagues analysed 72 focus groups across four countries.

The Zimbabwe component covered six rural communities in Gwanda and Nyanga.

The researchers found that water collection consumed time and energy, while expectations about domestic work constrained women’s other activities.

They described “the expectation that household duties were completed before economic activities could begin.”

The study examined livelihoods, not pregnancy outcomes. Its relevance here is the order of obligations: fetching water enables the cooking, cleaning and care work that follows.

Mutengo’s collection journey is therefore only part of her workload.

A well does not mean enough water

In Buhera, Marian Chihwa, 22 and pregnant, has a well at her homestead.

What she lacks is enough water for all the household’s needs.

Chihwa, one of two wives in a polygamous household with several children, said the family uses the well for drinking water and the nearby Madzivaeshumba River for laundry and bathing.

“The good thing is that we are close to Madzivaeshumba River,” she said.

The household survives by dividing its needs between sources. That arrangement also shows why recording the presence of a well cannot establish whether a family has adequate access.

The WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme defines safely managed drinking water as coming from an improved source on the premises, available when needed and free from contamination.

For improved sources away from home, it distinguishes basic from limited service according to whether a return collection trip, including queueing, exceeds 30 minutes.

Those standards do not establish the quality of Chihwa’s well. They demonstrate that location, reliability and safety matter alongside the existence of infrastructure.

Her household’s difficulty is insufficient supply at home. Mutengo’s includes distance and uncertain transport.

Their circumstances demand more precise responses than treating all water shortages as the same problem.

Sharing the work

Evernice Mataga, 35 and pregnant, said her household well dried up in August.

Her family now uses a donkey-drawn cart to collect water from a borehole in Nhaka village, about two kilometres away, with her two sons helping.

“It is quite a challenge,” she said.

The water must cover virtually all household chores.

Unlike Mutengo’s account, Mataga’s describes collection supported by family labour and transport. That difference matters: women’s experiences of scarcity are shaped partly by what help their households can provide.

But assistance does not remove dependence on a water source outside the homestead.

Mataga said residents approached Ward 23 Councillor Gonese, who promised to raise their concerns with Buhera Central MP Sam Matema.

She wants solar-powered pumping, storage tanks and taps, citing systems she says operate elsewhere in the constituency.

Her request would change how water is supplied, rather than simply how her family carries it.

A repair, and the limits of repair

Village head Shadreck Pfumbidza said there had been an improvement in his community.

A borehole had been repaired following Matema’s intervention after parts, including its handle, were stolen, he said.

“Thanks to the intervention of our member of Parliament, it was repaired, and now it’s functioning, but it can’t service the whole village,” Pfumbidza said.

Residents also use a source known locally as a chitubu, although some travel long distances to reach it.

The repaired borehole is evidence of action. It also exposes the difference between restoring equipment and meeting a community’s needs.

According to Pfumbidza, damage interrupted the supply. Its repair has not resolved the wider access problem.

That distinction prevents rainfall from becoming an explanation for every failure. A broken pump requires maintenance; inadequate coverage requires assessment of demand, distribution and available water.

Pfumbidza wants another borehole drilled, with capacity testing before solar-powered pumping is installed.

He hopes reliable water could also support gardens, reducing dependence on rainfall for food production.

Matema was approached for comment on water shortages and the response in his constituency but had not responded by publication.

A source close to him said: “His schedule is packed and he would respond at his earliest convenience.”

Solar power needs a sustainable source

The residents’ interest in solar pumping offers a practical direction, but installing panels cannot by itself guarantee water security.

In its work on solar irrigation in the Sahel, the Food and Agriculture Organisation warns that groundwater extraction must be managed carefully to avoid undermining future supplies.

The principle is relevant to Pfumbidza’s proposal: the ability to pump more cheaply must be matched by evidence about how much water can be withdrawn sustainably.

His call for capacity testing recognises part of that requirement.

A useful system would also need maintenance arrangements, accessible collection points and decisions about how domestic demand and gardening share the supply.

Otherwise, new equipment could leave unresolved the same question residents face now: whether enough water reaches the households that need it.

Pregnancy beyond the clinic

The women’s accounts establish difficulties obtaining water.

They do not establish that any interviewee has suffered a pregnancy complication because of those difficulties.

The broader health evidence nevertheless explains why the conditions deserve attention.

WHO identifies pregnant women among groups particularly vulnerable to climate-related health risks.

Its review describes how drought can reduce access to safe water and food, while high temperatures are associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes.

That evidence places household water access within the conditions supporting maternal health, even before a woman reaches a clinic.

Children also participate in the response.

Mutengo’s daughter helps collect water, although these interviews provide no evidence that the task has affected her schooling.

A 2023 WHO/UNICEF report found that girls globally were nearly twice as likely as boys to take responsibility for fetching household water.

Mataga’s sons show that local arrangements can differ. Sharing the work can ease one woman’s burden; reliable supply can reduce the work required of the entire family.

The accounts from both communities suggest a practical measure of progress: fewer journeys, dependable supplies and enough water for personal needs alongside household chores.

For Mutengo, none of those outcomes is assured by occasional help.

The wheelbarrow belongs to someone else. Assistance from a scotch cart depends on who is available.

And once the water reaches home, she still weighs her needs against the work she believes she must perform.

“I cannot spend all the water on my personal hygiene,” she said.