Water will always be there, but not water security. It is a more enveloping concept that allows experts to better communicate the complexity of the urban water cycle to citizens, making them participate in its management model, in its benefits and risks. Well informed users enable the creation of a context with a participatory and transparent governance in which we all feel involved. Water security goes beyond the simple access to water and implies constant work.

Around fifty thousand women in Haiderpur will overcome the hygienic difficulties of menstruation, and many more have found work opportunities. Also more than 660 families in Bhiwadi can now avoid open defecation. Some testimonies of women benefitting from the projects of the Foundation in India show the importance of working for gender equality throughout the entire country.

Those who are invisible in the censuses, discriminated women, the inhabitants of the most vulnerable slums, all those ruined by droughts, those surrounded by polluted water, those on the other side of the technological barrier and those with no access to education on hygiene; all these population groups risk being excluded of the attainment of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation.

On World Women’s Day it is vital to point out that adult and young women and girls bear the brunt of the more than 2.1 billion people with no access to clean water and the 2.4 billion that lack adequate sanitation. Regardless of the injustice this implies, it is not possible to imagine a sustainable planet with this scourge of inequality.

The war in Syria has transformed the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. The fertile depression has become the shelter of the horrors and grief of war. The project of the Foundation, which brings sanitation to schools in the region, reveals that, despite being one of the countries with the greatest scarcity of water in the world, it has hosted more than one million refugees in the last seven years.

We are not aware of what we have until we lack it in a moment of need. The social experiment carried out by the Foundation in a well-off area of India on World Toilet Day started the campaign #CloseOpenDefecation in a country where more than 250 million people defecate in fields, streets and railways. A fake toilet stirred consciences.

In India, in addition to adequate and dignified toilets, it is necessary to extend knowledge and hygienic practices among the population, especially in schools and women of menstrual age. This is a goal that requires important socio-cultural and educational advances and is taken on by the We Are Water Foundation in its projects in India. On World Toilet Day these efforts took on special prominence.

The water taps on the streets of Methinkot ran dry after the devastating earthquake of 2015 in Nepal. The 700 inhabitants of the village now depend on a single fountain half an hour’s walk away. The short film The last Sprout, by Poudel, one of the finalists of the We Art Water Film Festival 4, tells the daily routine of Puspa, a 12-year-old girl, her mother and her aunt, who spend up to six hours every day fetching water.