Afghan Women Bear Brunt of Drought Burden
Looming crisis weighs heavy on those most often responsible for sourcing water to meet their household’s needs.
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Four times a day, 28- year-old Nadia dons a black hijab and ventures out of her rented house in Kabul in search of water to wash her family’s clothes and dishes.
She lives with her parents and two brothers, one of whom is disabled. Their own well dried up two years ago, and the family initially tried to make use of the water the local mosque provides for worshippers’ ablutions.
“The first time we used it, we all got sick,” she recalled. Now, her family buys a tank of drinking water once a week, which costs 500 Afghanis (7.3 US dollars).
To find water to meet the household’s other needs, Nadia is deputised to wander the streets in search of a supply. In the neighborhood, only one resident has a water source, but she often refuses to share.
“Even though women are prohibited from all public spaces,” Nadia said, “when it comes to fetching water, it’s a woman’s responsibility to cover up in hijab and push a cart to collect water.”
Afghanistan’s growing water crisis is having a severe impact on women and girls, not least because they are the ones most often responsible for collecting precious supplies for both household tasks and drinking.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 67 per cent of households in Afghanistan lack access to water.
Waterborne disease is an ever-present risk, while safe drinking water is expensive and imposes yet another burden on families struggling with poverty.
Meanwhile, the Taleban regime has continued to ramp up the restrictions on women, already banned from attending school after the age of eight and excluded from many jobs.
In August 2024, for instance, they prohibited women from using transportation alone as well as showing their faces or being heard speaking in public.
Sima, 27, and her older sister survive on their meagre income from traditional crafts, such as embroidery on clothes and scarves.
“It takes a month to embroider a pair of trousers, which sells for 1,000 Afghanis,” explained Sima.
The women, orphans who had lived with their uncle before he abandoned them after the Taleban takeover, scratch a living in one of the poorest areas of Kabul, a hillside neighbourhood in the west of the city. Sima explained that their social isolation – and the growing restriction on women’s lives – means that they often went hungry.
In addition, the women must travel an hour each day to collect two barrels of water from a mosque at the bottom of their hill.
And they face an even bigger challenge when it comes to obtaining clean drinking water.
“Once, there was no water for 15 days,” Sima recalled. “I would stay up at night until 3 am, waiting for the water to come back on.”
They need to pay around 400 Afghanis (six dollars) per month for drinking water, but their total monthly income is only about 3,000 Afghanis (45 dollars), of which three-quarters goes toward rent.
Looming Water Crisis
Najibullah Sadid, an Afghan expert on water resources and the environment, said that Afghanistan was extremely vulnerable to the impact of climate change, noting that the last four years had been dominated by drought.
“The first group to be affected in Afghanistan is women and children,” he emphasised, adding that these were the groups largely responsible for cooking, household chores and domestic work.
The World Resources Institute states that drought in Afghanistan will reach severe levels by the year 2040, and Sadid warned that this risked wiping out nearly all of Afghanistan’s domestic grain production of around four million tonnes. Even when conditions were optimal, he continued, an additional 2.5 million tonnes of grain had to imported to meet citizens needs.
In addition, Sadid stressed, the Taleban regime lacked any specific strategy or policy to address the looming crisis.
An OCHA report presented at last year’s UN climate change conference ranked Afghanistan fourth among the countries facing a drought crisis, noting that it was one of the most vulnerable and unprepared states in dealing with water stress.
Other Kabul residents report being threatened and asked for bribes when they tried to find their own solutions to the lack of municipal water supplies.
Kabul resident Razzaq (not his real name) faced strong opposition from his neighbour—a Taleban activist — when he attempted to dig a well in his house in the summer of 2023.
“The neighbour threatened that unless I give him half of the water, he wasn’t going to let me dig the well,” he said.
Nabi (also not his real name) related that when he first attempted to dig a well in 2022, he was told to apply for a government permit - which was then denied. Instead, the Taleban asked for a bribe and suggested he dig the well outside his house.
However, this year, after he finally managed to save some money, he was astonished by the amount he stood to pay to access a reliable water supply.
The cost of digging, he said, would be around 500,000 Afghanis (more than 7,000 dollars), “which is beyond the reach of any Afghan family".
