Every morning, across rural Africa, the first task of the day for millions of women and girls is to fetch water. RFLD’s new policy brief, Women, Water and Article 15 of the Maputo Protocol, starts from this daily reality and asks a legal question: what have African States already promised women on water, and how far have they delivered?
The answer is clear. The promise exists in binding law. Delivery lags far behind. This article sets out the main messages of the brief for readers who want the picture in a few minutes.
Women carry the water
Data from the WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) show who does this work. In households without water on the premises, women and girls aged 15 and over are mainly responsible for fetching it in 7 out of 10 cases. In sub-Saharan Africa, women are four times as likely as men to collect water.
The scale is large. Nearly half (45%) of the 1.2 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa rely on water that has to be collected. All 21 countries in the world where at least a quarter of households rely on women to fetch water are located in sub-Saharan Africa. The time cost is estimated at 250 million hours a day for women and girls worldwide, a figure cited by the UN World Water Development Report 2026.
The right already exists
The Maputo Protocol, the African Union’s treaty on the rights of women, was adopted in Maputo on 11 July 2003. Its Article 15 deals with the right to food security. Paragraph (a) obliges States Parties to take appropriate measures to “provide women with access to clean drinking water, sources of domestic fuel, land, and the means of producing nutritious food”.
RFLD’s brief puts it simply. The obligation is binding. What is missing is implementation, backed by budgets and by regular reporting to the African Commission. For a fuller explanation of how the treaty works, see our manual on shadow reports under the Maputo Protocol.
Access remains low in West and Central Africa
UN statistics drawn from JMP data show how far the region is from the goal. In 2024, only 30.6% of people in Western Africa used safely managed drinking water. In Middle Africa, the figure was 17.7%.
The rural figure for Middle Africa stands out. Only 2.8% of rural residents used safely managed drinking water in 2024. Fewer than 3 in every 100 rural people in Central Africa have a safely managed supply. For most rural households, water still has to be carried home, and the brief shows that women and girls do most of that carrying.
A rare political moment
2026 offers an unusual opening. The African Union chose water and sanitation as its theme of the year, under the title “Assuring Sustainable Water Availability and Safe Sanitation Systems to Achieve the Goals of Agenda 2063”. Heads of State endorsed and launched the Africa Water Vision 2063 and Policy at the AU summit in February 2026.
The brief argues that neither will deliver for women unless they are read together with Article 15 and with the African Commission’s Guidelines on the Right to Water, adopted in 2019.
A second opening came in March 2026. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights adopted Resolution 658, which tasks its mechanisms with developing Guidelines on the Right to Sanitation in Africa, with a specific focus on women and girls, within two years. Civil society now has two years to shape them.
What the brief covers
The brief is a desk study based on treaties, official statistics, UN documents, research and national laws, reviewed up to 4 October 2026. It looks at the data on women, girls and water, the legal framework, climate change, governance and financing. It includes six country case studies drawn from RFLD’s network:
- Senegal and Benin, both States Parties with no reservation to the Protocol;
- Ghana and Nigeria, two large West African States Parties;
- Niger, which signed the Protocol in 2004 and has not ratified it;
- Cameroon, which ratified in 2012 with a general interpretive declaration.
It closes with recommendations to each actor, an advocacy calendar for 2026 to 2028 and a checklist that States and civil society can use to report on Article 15.
What RFLD is asking for
RFLD calls on States to report on Article 15 in every periodic report to the African Commission. It asks them to fund women-led water committees and to make water points and sanitation safe from violence. It also asks them to publish water budgets that show who benefits.
These requests are practical. None of them needs a new treaty. They need governments to apply a commitment that most African States made more than two decades ago, and they need women to sit at the tables where water decisions are made.
Over the coming days, RFLD will publish a series of short articles that look at each part of the brief in turn: the data, the law, the six countries, climate, governance, money and the actions that each actor can take. Each piece stands on its own, so readers can start with the question that matters most to their work.
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.
