Where water flows, equality grows: Centering gender in agricultural water management to feed 10 billion people
On 22nd of March every year the world reflects on its most critical resource; water. This year, the World Water Day 2026 theme of Water and Gender – Where Water Flows, Equality Grows came at a defining moment in the global water and food security agenda. Concurrently, the World Bank released the 2026 Global Water Monitoring Report, Nourish and Flourish: Water Solutions to Feed 10 billion People on a Livable Planet. In this report, a key challenge emerges; current agricultural water management practices can sustainably feed only 3.4 billion people, yet the world population is projected to grow to 10 billion by 2050.
Currently, over half of the global food production is reliant on transgressing local natural resource thresholds for water land and biodiversity. Irrigated land currently stands at only 24% of the total agricultural land but produces over 40% of the world’s food. The benefits of expanding irrigation alone are immense, job creation, increased food production, and most crucial, promoting the sustainable use of water resources. To feed the growing population will require excess of US$ 1 trillion in public capital investment between 2026 and 2050. Technical and financial investments alone will not suffice, and gender equity will remain central.
According to the World Health Organization, over 2 billion people worldwide lack access to safely managed drinking water. Globally, women and girls bear a disproportionate burden of water collection. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the very region holding the greatest untapped irrigation potential, women and girls spend countless hours collecting water. This unpaid, invisible labour displaces time that could otherwise be invested in education, economic participation, and farming productivity.
The World Water Day 2026 theme places this reality squarely at the center of global water discourse. It recognizes that the global water crisis is, in critical ways, a women’s crisis. To feed the world sustainably, we must first acknowledge who grows the food, who carries the water, and who is systematically left out of decisions about both. Without safe water, sanitation and hygiene close to home, women and girls bear a heavier burden. Yet they remain systematically underrepresented in water governance bodies, irrigation management committees, and the policy forums where agricultural water management investments are decided.
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The Nourish and Flourish report introduces a new water-food nexus framework. It categorizes countries by their level of freshwater stress and their food trade position, whether they are net calorie importers or exporters. This framework enables context-specific AWM pathways rather than generic, one-size-fits-all solutions. It is a powerful analytical tool. But to be truly transformative, it must be layered with gender analysis.
Many sub-Saharan Africa nations fall under the category of water secure food importers. The report identifies farmer-led irrigation development (FLID) as a key opportunity in this context. Smallholder farmers, who represent 84 percent of the world’s 570 million farmers, are central to this strategy. In most of these countries, women constitute the majority of smallholder farmers. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, women account for 60 to 80 percent of food production. Without deliberate inclusion of women as beneficiaries, decision-makers, and innovators within FLID programmes, the enormous job creation and food security potential identified in the report will remain partially unrealised.
The report’s own example from Uganda’s Micro-Scale Irrigation Programme is instructive: between 2020 and 2024, only 21 percent of the 4,733 participating farmers were women. This figure, though a starting point, underscores how gender gaps persist even in well-designed, innovative programmes. It signals that intentionality is required.
The Nourish and Flourish Report identifies the need to collect fit-for-purpose, accessible and actionable data as key to proper agricultural water management. Incorporating gender disaggregated data into national water resource assessments, supply chain risk mapping and investment planning critical. It will help bring to fore the specific vulnerabilities and excluded potential of women farmers, female headed households and girls who miss school as a result of water inaccessibility. Gender disaggregated data makes AWM analysis more accurate and effective.
The World Water Day 2026 theme amplified a message that forward-looking companies are already beginning to internalise: water stewardship is incomplete without a gender lens. Traditional water has primarily been considered through the environmental pillar — focused on watershed assessments, consumption efficiency, and risk mapping. But water is a deep social resource, and its social dimensions are heavily gendered.
Companies operating in water-stressed regions or managing supply chains in agriculture, textiles, or food processing must grapple with the reality that gender-blind water management creates social risk. Where water resources are channeled disproportionately to male-dominated productive uses, social cohesion fractures. Community acceptance, the social license that businesses depend on, erodes. Gender-responsive water stewardship is, therefore, sound risk management.
The Nourish and Flourish framework’s emphasis on public-private partnerships (PPPs) and private sector participation as critical levers for scaling AWM investment. Innovative financing instruments, blended finance, credit guarantees, results-based financing, must explicitly target women farmers and women-led enterprises as both beneficiaries and agents of change.
Integrating the imperatives of World Water Day 2026 with the policy recommendations of Nourish and Flourish points to five concrete action areas for governments, businesses, and development partners:
First, collect and use gender-disaggregated water data. National irrigation investment plans, watershed assessments, and corporate water risk tools must consider women’s water access, use, and decision-making roles. Kenya’s National Irrigation Sector Investment Plan, highlighted in the report as a model of participatory, farmer-centered planning. This offers a template that can be strengthened by explicitly mainstreaming gender in its data collection and performance monitoring systems.
Second, guarantee women’s inclusion in water governance. The report’s call for multistakeholder platforms at basin and regional levels (bringing together farmers, governments, and civil society) must operationalise gender parity as a governance standard. Women’s representation in water users’ associations, irrigation management bodies, and national water policy forums is a measurable target, not an aspiration.
Third, target AWM investments toward women smallholders. Subsidy programmes, technology access schemes, and capacity-building initiatives must actively reach women farmers. The report’s finding that three quarters of US$490 billion was spent globally on agricultural support in 2023 represents a profound opportunity for strategic reallocation toward gender-responsive investments.
Fourth, use technology to reduce the water burden on women. The report highlights the transformative potential of solar-powered irrigation, digital advisory tools, and machine learning for groundwater mapping. These technologies, designed and deployed with gender equity in mind, can directly reduce the time women and girls spend collecting water, free up productive capacity, and lower the energy costs of irrigation for women farmers.
Fifth, build accountability systems that track gendered outcomes. Results-based financing, performance contracts, and regulatory frameworks for irrigation service delivery must include gender-specific indicators. Progress on women’s economic empowerment, access to water infrastructure, and participation in water governance should be as rigorously monitored as crop yields and water use efficiency.
Water stewardship that ignores gender is not just inequitable; it is inefficient, and insufficient for the challenges ahead. The leaking tap in our water management systems is not only a technical failure; it is a gender data gap, a governance gap, and a justice gap. Fixing it requires the same urgency, ambition, and systems-thinking that the world must now bring to feeding its 10 billion people on a livable planet. Where water flows, equality must grow, and where equality grows, food security follows.