EVERY day, women and girls around the world spend an estimated 200 million hours collecting water, according to monitoring by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund. That is roughly the equivalent of 25 million women and girls working full time every day just to secure water. Water scarcity is usually framed as a public health problem affecting disease, sanitation and child mortality. These concerns are real and urgent. But water systems also shape how households allocate one of their most valuable resources: “time.”
When water is distant or unreliable, securing it becomes work. Someone must fetch it, store it and ration it through shortages. In many parts of the world, that burden falls disproportionately on women and girls.
A body of development economics research examines water access through the lens of household time use. Using household survey data across nine developing countries, economists Gayatri Koolwal and Dominique van de Walle find that improved water access reduces collection time and is associated with higher school enrollment among children. When households spend fewer hours securing water, that time can be reallocated toward education, income-generating work or caregiving.
The implications are particularly significant for women. In many communities, they remain primarily responsible for securing and managing household water. Long collection trips and hours spent managing unreliable supply represent a hidden form of unpaid labor.
The evidence on girls’ schooling is striking. A study by Nauges and Strand using household survey data from Ghana found that halving water-fetching time was associated with a 2.4-percentage-point increase in girls’ school attendance, with stronger effects in rural communities. Koolwal and van de Walle found similar patterns across South Asia and the Middle East. In Yemen, Morocco and Pakistan, a one-hour reduction in travel time to water sources was associated with enrollment gains of roughly 10 to 20 percentage points for girls, with larger effects in countries where the gender gap in schooling was already wide.
The pattern is documented in Philippine government-linked programs as well. The Asian Development Bank’s Infrastructure for Rural Productivity Enhancement Sector project, implemented across 779 municipalities in the Visayas and Mindanao, recorded the same dynamic directly. One beneficiary described spending at least six hours a day collecting water from a river half a kilometer away, with two of her children helping each morning and afternoon, causing them to miss school regularly. After a tap stand was installed near her home, she described having free time to grow vegetables for market. Project reporting indicates this experience was common across coverage areas: women gained time that flowed into income generation, reduced child illness and improved school attendance.
The implications for women’s economic participation extend beyond schooling. Improved water access reduces the time women spend on unpaid water-related labor, but whether that time translates into paid work depends on labor market access, social norms and available opportunities. But the precondition for any of that is having the time in the first place.
Yet this time, burden rarely appears in how water investments are evaluated.
In other infrastructure sectors, time savings are central to project evaluation. Transport investments, for example, are routinely justified by the hours they return to commuters and businesses. Shorter travel times are treated as economic gains and incorporated directly into cost-benefit analysis. Water infrastructure produces a similar return. But the time it frees does not flow neatly into labor markets. Instead, it flows into school attendance, caregiving and the everyday work of sustaining households.
Because these outcomes are less visible and harder to price, they are seldom part of how water investments get justified and evaluated. Yet this cost is real. And the tools to measure it exist.
This March, as the world marks World Water Day on March 22 and celebrates Women’s Month, that dimension of water policy deserves more than acknowledgement. It deserves a methodology.
I came to this question through infrastructure evaluation work, where the standard frameworks are better built for counting revenues and traffic than for capturing what water access means to a woman who no longer spends her mornings at a river. The hours spent fetching, storing and waiting for water are not just a private inconvenience. They are a cost that falls disproportionately on women and girls — one that better water systems can reduce.
Charlene Morales graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Master in Public Administration in International Development program in 2025. Trained in civil engineering and economics, she works on infrastructure and development, with a particular interest in how infrastructure expands opportunity and the freedom to live with dignity.
