Despite decades of progress, inequalities continue to compromise global water security, disproportionally impacting women and girls, who despite of being the main collectors of water, continue to be excluded from water management and leadership roles.
This is the conclusion of the United Nations World Water Development Report, published by UNESCO on behalf of UN-Water. The report reveals that women are responsible for collecting water in over 70% of unserved rural households.
“Ensuring women’s participation in water management and governance is a key driver for progress and sustainable development. We must step up efforts to safeguard women and girls’ access to water. This is not only a basic right, when women have equal access to water, everyone benefits,” said Khaled El-Enany, UNESCO’s Director General.
“It is time to fully recognise the central role of women and girls in water solutions – as users, leaders and professionals. We need women and men to manage water side by side as a common good that benefits the whole of society,” said Alvaro Lario, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and Chair of UN-Water.
The United Nations World Water Development Report is released annually in the context of World Water Day. This year’s report, Water for All People: Equal Rights and Opportunities, warns that 2.1 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, with women and girls bearing the heaviest burden.
Women and girls are most often responsible for collecting and managing water for their households, exposing them to physical strain, lost education and livelihoods, health risks, and heightened vulnerability to gender-based violence – particularly where services are unsafe or unreliable.
Key findings
- Globally, women and girls spend a total of 250 million hours every day collecting water, time that could otherwise be spent on education, leisure, or income-generating activities. Girls under 15 (7%) are more likely than boys under 15 (4%) to fetch water.
- Poor sanitation facilities disproportionately affect women and girls, especially in urban slums and rural areas. Lack of toilets and water for menstrual hygiene leads to shame and absenteeism: an estimated 10 million adolescent girls (15–19), across 41 countries, missed school, work, or social activities between 2016 and 2022.
- Despite their central role in household water provision, agriculture, ecosystem stewardship, and community resilience, women remain systematically underrepresented in water governance, financing, utilities, and decision-making.
- Despite numerous gender equality declarations and policies, progress towards equal access to water and sanitation, and women’s participation in water management, remain insufficient due to weak integration into operational plans.
- Gender inequalities in land and property ownership directly impact women’s access to water. Water rights are often linked to land rights, directly impacting the availability of water for productive uses such as farming. Land tenure-related laws and regulations that discriminate against women leave them at social and economic disadvantages. In some countries, men have ownership over twice the amount of land than women.
- Women remain under-represented in water management and governance, available data from 64 utilities in 28 low- and middle-income countries indicated that fewer than one in five water workers were women, and they were paid less than their male counterparts (World Bank, 2019). In 2021/2022, women held fewer than half of WASH positions in government jobs in 79 of 109 responding countries and fewer than 10% in almost a quarter of responding countries (WHO,2022).
Gender inequality in times of crisis
Climate change, water scarcity and hydro-meteorological disasters are exacerbating existing gender inequalities, particularly in water-stressed and disaster-prone contexts. Gender remains a key determinant of vulnerability, shaping exposure to risk as well as access to early-warning systems, recovery support and long-term livelihood security. Evidence shows that climate change disproportionately affects women: a 1°C rise in temperature reduces incomes in female-headed households by 34% more than in male-headed households, while women’s weekly labour hours increase by an average of 55 minutes relative to men.
A call to bridge the gender gaps in water access and leadership
The report provides concrete recommendations to drive meaningful progress, including:
- Removing legal, institutional and financial barriers to women’s equal rights to water, land and services
- Scaling up gender‑responsive financing and budgeting, with strong accountability mechanisms
- Investing in sex‑disaggregated water data to expose inequalities and guide policy
- Valuing unpaid water‑related labour in planning, pricing and investment decisions
- Strengthening women’s leadership and technical capacity, particularly in scientific and technical fields of water governance
- Moving beyond “low‑cost” solutions that rely on unpaid labour and exacerbate inequality.