By Jay Water Advisory
Every 22nd of March, the world pauses to mark World Water Day. This year’s theme — “Water and Gender: Where Water Flows, Equality Grows” — turns the lens on something that statistics often obscure: water scarcity is not experienced equally, and those who bear the heaviest burden of water insecurity are overwhelmingly women and girls.
In Nigeria, that burden has a face and a name — even if we rarely say it out loud.
Hauwa’s Morning
In a community in northeastern Nigeria, Hauwa wakes before 5am. Not because she wants to. Because if she does not, the queue at the community borehole will be too long, and she will spend the entire morning waiting instead of attending school. On the mornings she oversleeps, she misses class. On the mornings the borehole is broken, which happens often, she walks further.
Her mother does the same for the household’s cooking water. Her younger sister helps carry. Her father does not.
This is not an unusual arrangement. Across Nigeria, women and girls are the primary water collectors in the vast majority of households, spending hours daily on a task that, if water infrastructure worked properly, it would only take minutes. Only 26.5% of Nigeria’s population uses improved drinking water sources and sanitation facilities. The burden of this gap falls disproportionately on women.
The Numbers Behind Nigeria’s Water Reality
The statistics paint a stark picture. About 70 million Nigerians lack access to safe drinking water. That’s more than a third of the country’s population. Contaminated drinking water and poor sanitation cause more than 70,000 deaths among children under five every year in Nigeria. These are children who die from diarrhoea, cholera, and waterborne illnesses that acess to clean water would prevent.
The Sustainable Development Goal 6 (universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water by 2030) target timeline is now just four years away. Achieving that target globally would require a six-fold increase in the current rate of progress on drinking water.
World Water Day 2026’s focus on water and gender is particularly resonant for Nigeria. When a girl like Hauwa spends her morning fetching water instead of sitting in a classroom, the consequences extend far beyond her thirst. She falls behind academically. Her opportunities narrow. The cycle of poverty that water insecurity causes both reflects and reinforces continues into another generation.
What Needs to Happen
Progress on Nigeria’s water crisis requires action at multiple scales simultaneously.
At the infrastructure level, investment in water treatment and distribution systems must expand dramatically and not just in major cities but in the peri-urban communities and rural areas where the deficit is deepest.
At the community level, solutions like rainwater harvesting, borehole maintenance cooperatives, and wastewater reuse can make meaningful differences without waiting for government infrastructure.
What You Can Do
World Water Day is not just an occasion for institutions. It is a call for individuals, communities, and professionals to examine their own relationship with water.
- Share credible information
- Advocate for water infrastructure investment in your community. Report broken boreholes and pipelines to local authorities.
- Support organisations working on WASH access in underserved Nigerian communities.
- And if you have the means, set up rainwater harvesting at your own property. Reducing your pressure on shared water resources is a concrete and immense contribution.
For Hauwa, and for the millions of girls and women across Nigeria whose mornings begin before dawn at a borehole queue, progress on water is not abstract. It is the difference between a childhood spent in school and one spent in a queue.
This World Water Day, that is worth remembering.
Jay water advisory 