Senegal is at the centre of global water diplomacy in 2026. It co-hosts the UN Water Conference in December and hosted its preparatory meeting in January. At home, it is drafting a new Water Code. RFLD’s policy brief, Women, Water and Article 15 of the Maputo Protocol, includes Senegal as one of six country case studies. This article summarises what it found.
Senegal and the Maputo Protocol
Senegal signed the Maputo Protocol on 26 December 2003 and ratified it on 27 December 2004. It deposited its instrument of ratification on 30 January 2005. It made no reservation. Article 15, with its duty to “provide women with access to clean drinking water”, applies to Senegal in full.
Access to water in 2024
According to the UN Statistical Yearbook, which draws on WHO and UNICEF data, 27.2% of Senegal’s population used safely managed drinking water in 2024. The urban figure was 41.1%. In rural areas it was 13.2%.
Safely managed sanitation stood at 30.1%. Here the pattern is unusual: rural areas (32.6%) scored higher than urban areas (27.5%).
The rural water gap matters for women. A 2018 World Bank appraisal states that “88 percent of adult women in the Groundnut Basin collect water”. Where only about one rural resident in eight has a safely managed supply, that collection is a daily task.
The legal framework
Senegal’s Water Code is still Law No. 81-13 of 4 March 1981. It was written more than two decades before the Maputo Protocol. The brief found no explicit right to water in the Constitution.
Reform is on the agenda. At the Council of Ministers of 19 February 2025, President Bassirou Diomaye Faye called for the draft new Water Code to be finalised. He also announced an independent regulator for the water sector and a revision of the arrangements for delegating rural water services.
This is the opening RFLD wants to use. A new Code is a chance to write women’s rights into national water law for the first time.
A programme that involved women
Senegal already has experience of designing water services with women in mind. The World Bank’s Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project (P164262) was approved on 21 June 2018 with EUR 107.5 million, about USD 130 million. It closed on 30 June 2023.
The project reached 1.5 million beneficiaries, more than half of them women. It contained several gender features:
- it encouraged “women’s participation in choosing the locations of household connection or water public stand-pipe”;
- it tracked the satisfaction of female users;
- it required toilet designs that assure women’s and girls’ “privacy and security”;
- it counted women among beneficiaries, so results could be reported by sex.
These are practical measures. They show that the duties in Article 15 and in the African Commission’s Guidelines on the Right to Water can be turned into project rules.
Senegal has also set up an inter-ministerial platform on menstrual health, placed under the Ministry of Water and Sanitation. This links water policy with girls’ health and education.
Senegal on the global stage
Senegal and the United Arab Emirates co-host the 2026 UN Water Conference, convened by UN General Assembly resolution 78/327 for 2 to 4 December 2026 in the UAE. Senegal hosted the high-level preparatory meeting in Dakar on 26 and 27 January 2026. The UN-Water GLAAS 2025 report on water and sanitation systems was launched there.
Dakar was also where the African Ministers’ Council on Water adopted the Africa Water Vision 2063 and Policy, on 29 September 2025. In October 2026, the city hosts the 89th Ordinary Session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
Few countries have this much influence over the water agenda in a single year. RFLD’s brief argues that Senegal can lead by example at home, by making its new Water Code a model of gender-responsive law.
What RFLD recommends for Senegal
The brief asks States to include a gender chapter in national water laws and codes, “starting with the revisions under way in Senegal and Cameroon”. That chapter should include a duty to reduce women’s time burden and to guarantee safe access at any time of day.
It also asks for binding quotas of at least 40% women in water user associations, municipal water committees, basin authorities and national regulators. Senegal’s planned independent regulator is a natural place to start. Applied to Senegal, the brief’s recommendations also mean reporting on Article 15 in the next periodic report to the African Commission, with sex-disaggregated data.
For more on Senegal’s legal commitments to women, see RFLD’s country law profiles.
About the report
This article draws on RFLD’s report Women, Water and Article 15 of the Maputo Protocol, published on 4 October 2026. Read the summary, download the English edition or the French edition.
