Climate change continues to exacerbate water and sanitation issues in Latin America, as water scarcity and natural disasters threaten water supply and infrastructure. My research explores the role that gender dimension plays in urban water and sanitation projects in Latin America, and examines strategies used to improve urban water and sanitation for low-income dwellers in Lima, Peru and Cochabamba, Bolivia. Both objectives were accomplished based on an extensive literature review. I argue that gender specific data is vital to collect, in that women face significant disparities in treatment and exclusion from policy. I also examined the sustainable solutions introduced by Lima, Peru and Cochabamba, Bolivia, that address severe water shortages, inadequate facilities and ineffective governance. These case studies were analyzed using Gordon McGranahan’s Framework of Challenges describing incentive barriers facing community driven initiatives. This paper exemplifies aspects of lucrative progress from these case studies to identify solutions that can be emulated by other cities. If other cities wish to scale up the findings of my research, some recommendations follow: utilize workshops and collaborative dialogue with citizens who may be affected by projects, collect climate, population and demographic data to observe future trends and finally, prioritize climate change mitigation as soon as possible.

This research focuses on the factors that influence male, African-American, high school students’ decision to continue their education at a four-year university. Although several factors can impact the decision to attend college, this study focuses on the roles of societal factors and individual attributes. Societal factors include influences that are outside the control of individual students, ranging from the amount of resources offered by the high school to the availability of family financial support for college. Individual attributes refers to factors that encourage students to not attend college, but pursue other options such as joining the military service, or opting to work. A survey was sent out to African-American male students at Olympic High School in Charlotte, North Carolina to determine which factor played a larger role. My research showed that societal factors played a larger role in the male’s decisions to attend or not attend a four year university.