The Current Column

World Water Day 2026

Empowering equitable water flows

Houdret, Annabelle / Anindita Sarkar
The Current Column (2026)

Bonn: German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), The Current Column of 16 March 2026

Bonn, 16 March 2026. Better water governance for and with women means better health, education, and economies for everyone. The opportunity is hiding in plain sight.

Turn on a tap in Munich, Milan or Marrakesh and water flows. Clean, immediate, and available to everyone. It is easy to treat water as a technical service of pipes and bills. But water is also political and economic power, and that power is distributed unequally. It is about who decides, who benefits, and who is left behind.

Due to their different tasks and responsibilities, and inadequate infrastructure, women suffer disproportionally from water problems caused by droughts, floods, and a lack of water treatment. UN World Water Day 2026 focuses on water and gender because ‘where water flows, equality grows’. Awareness is rising: 76% of national water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) policies have measures to reach women and girls. But implementation is lagging behind, as not even half of the countries track and report related progress, and only 27% consistently direct financial resources to women and girls for this purpose. In many places, access to water for sanitation, hygiene, and agriculture still depends on gender, although more equity in the sector would leverage important development opportunities for all. Improving this requires being aware of and changing power relations that shape water access.

Equality cannot exist when in seven out of ten households without water on the premises, women and girls are primarily responsible for fetching it. The price is lost school hours, physical strain, and daily exposure to harassment or even sextortion. We cannot achieve development when 156 million girls worldwide aged 10–19 still lack access to basic hygiene services, compromising their health, dignity and education.

Enabling water equity
Real progress requires three shifts: recognising women’s roles and needs in water management and agriculture, investing in gender-sensitive infrastructure, and ensuring women have meaningful power in water governance.

Across much of the world, water management has been feminised by necessity, and where it has, important changes are visible. As men migrate to cities, women increasingly take on irrigation tasks, maintain village water points, and hold communities together throughout droughts and floods. Supporting these women would enable them to access related opportunities rather than merely bearing the burdens of these trends. Women’s access to irrigation water and land, for instance, generates income and improves food security. It also can form the basis of female agricultural cooperatives. In Morocco and elsewhere, such cooperatives drive collective action ranging from economic cooperation to networking, peer-exchange, education activities and efforts to combat gender-based violence.

Progress on water equity also requires gender sensitive (water) infrastructure, such as school sanitation, safe water access for households, and adequate working conditions on construction and operational sites of water infrastructure. Gender sensitive water infrastructure contributes to education, health, access to employment and security. Safe school sanitation increases girls’ attendance. In western Rajasthan, tanker deliveries have reduced the need for women to walk miles for water. Piped water within premises and tube wells located close to homes have reduced harassment during water collection in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Creating safe working conditions for women increased the inclusion of female engineers and workers, as positive experiences on dam construction sites in Morocco showed.

More women leaders, better water services
And it’s about who decides: women still remain largely excluded from water governance and don’t have much say in the control and management of the resource and its infrastructure, nor in decisions about access. In 2023, 15% of all countries still had no mechanisms to ensure women’s participation in water governance, and women hold just 26% of leadership positions in surveyed water organisations. When women are involved, water systems perform better, showing operational gains (better maintenance, more efficient irrigation, cleaner water), improved health, nutrition, education, economic opportunity, and environmental awareness. Investing in women's participation in water governance is therefore not a social nicety — it is a development imperative.

Let’s empower equitable water flows for everyone’s development, because it’s not only about pipes and bills, it’s about who decides, who benefits, and who is left behind.

 

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This is a column of the Bonn Water Network, of which the authors are members:

Dr Annabelle Houdret is a political scientist and senior researcher in the research department "Environmental Governance” at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) in Bonn.

Prof. Anindita Sarkar is a Professor in the Department of Geography at Miranda House, University of Delhi, and a senior researcher at the Department of Ecology and Natural Resources Management at the Center for Development Research, University of Bonn.