On July 31, Africa honors its women. The African Union has designated 2026 as the Year of Water: « Ensuring sustainable access to clean water and safe sanitation to achieve the goals of Agenda 2063 ». This date marks a historic milestone—the 1962 Dar es Salaam Women’s Conference—and reflects a political commitment to center African women’s struggles within the continent’s independence narratives rather than imported agendas.

In Senegal, this celebration must confront two uncomfortable truths: the nation’s economy thrives on the backs of women who are undercounted or ignored, and these same women bear the brunt of water scarcity and inadequate sanitation—the very issues the AU’s prioritization aims to resolve. From internal migrants to domestic workers in Dakar’s households, street vendors, and market traders, their labor is everywhere. Yet their contributions remain absent from public policy debates, and access to clean water and decent sanitation—a fundamental right for their dignity and labor—often feels like an unmet aspiration rather than a guaranteed privilege.

Why the AU’s 2026 theme demands a gendered lens

We focus on a group of women disproportionately affected by water and sanitation challenges, but this isn’t just about infrastructure. Sustainable access to water and sanitation cannot be achieved without recognizing the diverse realities of women—especially those in precarious migration pathways. Homogenizing their experiences risks overlooking the unique vulnerabilities tied to their status, whether as internal migrants, domestic workers, or foreign nationals in Senegal. Protecting their rights is as crucial as ensuring infrastructure development.

From rural water hauls to urban invisibility

In much of rural Senegal, water collection is a daily burden placed on women and girls. This unpaid labor drains time from education, health, and income-generating activities, pushing young women toward urban centers. Each year, they migrate from the countryside to Dakar or secondary cities, where they find work as domestic helpers, street food vendors, or small-scale traders (Lo, Coulibaly, Sakho, 2014). These women care for urban households’ children, manage market stalls, clean offices and homes, and prepare meals in countless households. Their labor is deeply intertwined with access to water in their employers’ homes. Informal work employs nearly half of Senegal’s workforce, with women making up 51.3% nationally—yet only 41.5% in Dakar. They are concentrated in the most precarious roles: unregistered workers without contracts or social protection. This internal migration, largely unacknowledged, serves as the first step in longer migratory journeys.

Senegal as a haven: the double burden on foreign women

Senegal has long been a destination for Africans, hosting 207,791 foreign residents as of 2023—44.3% of them women—primarily from neighboring countries: Guinea (40.3%), Mali (14.9%), Guinea-Bissau (4.4%), Gambia (3.0%), and Mauritania (2.1%). In border regions like Kédougou, foreign residents from Mali or Guinea outnumber returned Senegalese.

Yet this tradition of hospitality is under threat. A rising xenophobic rhetoric has targeted African migrants—particularly Guinean Fulani—accusing them of straining public schools or altering the country’s demographic balance. Political voices have called for stricter residency rules and even revoking birthright citizenship for children born in Senegal to foreign parents. This discourse mirrors South Africa’s cyclical xenophobic violence, where Senegalese migrants in Durban faced similar scapegoating.

Foreign women in Senegal: navigating layered vulnerabilities

In this climate, African women migrants face compounded risks. Many work in domestic or informal trade roles similar to their Senegalese counterparts—without contracts, social protection, or legal status. Their access to water and safe sanitation often depends on employers or informal networks. When collective suspicion targets a nationality or ethnicity, these women become prime targets for harassment, exploitation, or violence, particularly in public and domestic spaces. Reporting such abuse is rare, as doing so risks exposing their communities to further discrimination or jeopardizing their already fragile administrative status. Xenophobia is never gender-neutral; for foreign women, it intensifies existing vulnerabilities tied to informal labor, lack of legal protections, and unequal access to essential services like water, sanitation, and healthcare.

ECOWAS-AES rupture: new risks for Malian, Burkinabè, and Nigerien women workers

Since January 2025, the free movement and residency rights of Malian, Burkinabè, and Nigerien women are no longer guaranteed by the 1979 ECOWAS Protocol or its institutional mechanisms (including the ECOWAS Court of Justice). Instead, these rights now rest on reciprocal political declarations—arrangements that can be revised unilaterally at any time, without legal safeguards.

For domestic workers without documents—such as a Foreigner Identity Card, which many long-term migrants lack due to high non-compliance rates—residency now depends on fragile political agreements rather than stable legal status. With the Sahel experiencing deadly attacks in spring 2026, the risk of increased female migration from Mali to Senegal rises. Civil society and unions must monitor how Malian, Burkinabè, and Nigerien women are treated administratively, especially regarding access to legal identity, healthcare, and education for their children—services now at greater risk due to the shift from a stable multilateral protocol to a bilateral arrangement.

Colonial borders and the roots of today’s xenophobia

To understand this moment, we must examine xenophobia from within African contexts, not through imported frameworks. The continent’s borders, largely artifacts of the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, were drawn without regard for preexisting kinship, trade, or community networks (as Achille Mbembe argues). Postcolonial states, often fragile and seeking national legitimacy, have turned to « autochthony »—defining who is « truly » of the soil and who is not—as a way to unify uncertain nations, at the cost of excluding long-resident « foreigners. » This logic fueled South Africa’s Afrophobia and now resurfaces in Dakar. An anti-racist lens adapted to Africa must name this phenomenon for what it is: intra-African xenophobia that reproduces colonial divisions among Black populations—a risk Frantz Fanon warned of in *The Wretched of the Earth* as the greatest threat to post-independence nations.

We must also apply a decolonial gender lens. Scholars like Oyèronké Oyèwùmí and Amina Mama have shown how colonialism reshaped gender categories, which postcolonial nationalists later weaponized to define national belonging. Foreign women—through their fertility, children born in Senegal, and roles as domestic workers—become key sites in controlling national boundaries. The right to citizenship for their children is often the first target in debates over birthright revocations. To address the vulnerabilities of Senegalese women migrating internally and African women migrating to Senegal, we must reject two errors: ignoring Senegal’s responsibility toward those it hosts, and applying foreign-born analytical frameworks without adapting them to African histories of borders and statehood.

Water and sanitation: an invisible frontier for migrant women

The AU’s 2026 theme isn’t just technical jargon—it directly shapes the lives of migrant women. Consider the neighborhoods where internal migrants and African women settle: in Dakar’s outskirts, access to piped water and safe sanitation is often partial. The absence of decent toilets disproportionately endangers women and girls, especially after dark. Then there’s the workplace: domestic workers living with their employers have no labor rights guaranteeing access to water or sanitation. Their dependence mirrors that of Senegalese women working as domestic help abroad or African women employed as domestic workers in Senegal. Without addressing the specific living and working conditions of migrant women, the AU’s water and sanitation goals will fail those most in need.

Making sustainable water and sanitation a cornerstone of Agenda 2063 means ensuring these services reach migrant women—those who leave, those who return, and those arriving from other African nations. Water policies that ignore migrant neighborhoods or tie service access to legal status will miss their target entirely. This is where continental agendas and gender justice intersect.

A hospitality that crosses borders—and a shared duty to water

African Women’s Day shouldn’t be a ritual tribute, nor should the AU’s 2026 theme remain a summit slogan. Together, they offer a simple, dual political conclusion: without migrant women—Senegalese women moving within their own country and African women migrating to Senegal—entire sectors of the subregion’s economies would grind to a halt. And without guaranteed access to clean water and safe sanitation for these women—at home, at work, and in their neighborhoods—the goals of Agenda 2063 will remain hollow for those who need them most. Hospitality that stops at national borders, or a water policy that excludes these women, misses the same opportunity: to build a future where dignity and access are universal.