When water supply improvements are coupled with opportunity to create income through micro-enterprises, time released from water collection is converted into income earned. This brings several benefits: reduced drudgery, higher household income, and, consequently, greater women's empowerment through changing gender relations within the household. This article documents the performance of one such scheme in Banaskantha District in the state of Gujarat in India, one of poorest districts in the state and the country. Here, due to the efforts of the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), an Indian NGO, poor women are reaping the social and economic benefits of a government-run regional piped water supply scheme, a project funded by Dutch bilateral aid, focusing on women's development. If government policy-makers took the cue and formulated programmes and schemes that combined these two aspects, viz., actions that release time for rural women from daily chores (e.g., collecting water, fuel wood and fodder) and opportunities for sustainable micro-enterprises to convert time saved into income, this could become a reliable route out of rural poverty into gender-sensitive sustainable development.

In a rapidly changing and ever more complex world, 'wicked problems', which traditional, narrowly focused research struggles to grapple with, are becoming more and more common, including in the water sector. Here, numerous good practices derived through traditional research have shown a remarkable resistance towards scaling up. This paper discusses the Learning Alliance approach and its application to try to overcome the twin challenges of solving complex problems and scaling-up innovations in urban water management. Learning alliances are interlinked multi-stakeholder platforms formed at appropriate levels. Critically, the purpose of a learning alliance is to do things differently, rather than to do different things, in order to have more impact on policy and practice. The paper summarizes initial experiences and lessons learned in applying this approach in three urban water management projects.

In tbis paper tbe value of an improved domestic water supply was investigated for economic development and gender relations in rural households in a drought-prone area. A comparative study executed witb participatory rural appraisal (PRA) methods with groups of women from 11 micro-enterprises in ten villages and five control villages showed that,when an improved domestic water supply does not function, the entrepreneurs groups bave a statistically higber loss of the economic use of water and time tban the control groups. The extra income tbat women gain wben tbe supply works and is used economically belps poor families to bridge tbe dry season. It could further be quantitatively proven that male-female gender relations were significantly better in the entrepreneurs group. Tbis was not so for mother-daughter relationsbips, wbicb gave new insights into the need to address gender equality i.ssues witb the women themselves and witb SEW A, the supporting agency. These findings support ibe view that rural poverty and tbe status of women would receive a significant boost if policy makers focused on providing employment opportun i tie.s for women along witb improved water supplies.

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