ON WORLD Water Day, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR) implores local and central government to eliminate inequalities and barriers inhibiting access to water and ensure that where water flows, equality grows.
Commemorated every year on 22 March, World Water Day is an annual United Nations (UN) observance focusing on highlighting the importance of water and to raise awareness of the more than 2 billion people living without access to safe water.
ZLHR pays tribute to all trailblazing women, who are playing critical roles in tackling the global water crisis and supporting the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 6: water and sanitation for all by 2030, whose aim is to ensure that all people have access to safe water throughout the world by 2030.
Regrettably, as the world commemorates World Water Day this year, women and girls remain left behind with only some few years left before the 2030 deadline set by the UN for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
In 2026, World Water Day is commemorated under the theme “Water and Gender”, thereby highlighting how water and gender equality are deeply interconnected. This fitting theme, which focuses on safe water and sanitation as human rights and critical enablers of gender equality, shows that the global water crisis affects everyone, but not equally. Where people lack the fundamental human rights to safe, clean, and potable water and sanitation, inequalities flourish, with girls and women bearing the brunt.
In Zimbabwe, where access to safe, clean and potable water remains a mirage, girls and women bear a heavier burden than their male counterparts as they are the ones mainly tasked with collecting and managing water including providing care to people, whose illness is caused by unsafe water and yet they are often left out of decision-making processes.
Despite the adoption of a new Constitution in Zimbabwe in 2013, which contains progressive provisions such as section 77 that guarantees the right to safe, clean and potable water, several people in Zimbabwe continue to grapple with lack of access to water.
Zimbabwe has additional obligations to fulfil this fundamental right to water emanating from regional and international instruments that the government has voluntarily ratified. Failure of people to access potable water, which is the very resource on which a healthy, productive life depends, is a violation of human rights.
In 2026, World Water Day is marked at a saddening time when some local authorities have begun implementing a process commercialising water supply through privatisation of water, which has the impact of commodification of water, which will severely affect under-privileged and marginalised communities.
Privatisation will restrict access, burden households with exorbitant costs, and deepen social inequalities.
Instead of treating water as a tradeable good, local and central government must embrace a human-centred approach that guarantees water as a fundamental right and ensure that everyone has access to safe and potable water.
There is an urgent need to place people before profits and ensure that people are not left without access to clean, safe and potable water. Local and central government must adopt reasonable legislative and other related measures that are designed to progressively realise the right to clean, safe and potable water.
ENDS
Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights
Kodzero/Amalungelo House
No. 103 Sam Nujoma Street, Harare, Zimbabwe
Phone: (+263 8677005347, +263 242 764085/705370/708118
Email: info@zlhr.org
www.zlhr.org.zw
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