Every year on July 31st, Africa observes a day dedicated to its women. For 2026, the African Union has designated water as a central theme, focusing on the goal to “Ensure the sustainable availability of water and safe sanitation systems to achieve the objectives of Agenda 2063.” This significant date commemorates the landmark Dar es Salaam Conference of African Women in 1962, which ultimately led to the establishment of the Pan-African Women’s Organization during a 1974 congress held in Dakar. This historical trajectory underscores a deliberate political assertion: to firmly embed the struggles of African women within the narrative of independence and Pan-Africanism, rather than attributing them to external influences or agendas.
In Senegal, this day should compel us to confront two often-ignored truths: the nation’s stability and progress are heavily reliant on women whose contributions are either uncounted or underestimated; and these same women frequently bear the brunt of inadequate water and sanitation, dedicating their time, health, and safety to address deficiencies that the continent’s new priority aims to resolve. Whether they are internal migrants, domestic workers, street vendors, informal market assistants in Dakar, or migrants from other African countries, their labor is ubiquitous. Yet, official recognition of their efforts remains largely absent from public policy and social discourse. For many of these women, access to safe water and decent sanitation, which are fundamental to their work and dignity, remains a right to be fought for, not a given.
We choose to mark this day by highlighting a specific group of women particularly susceptible to challenges in accessing water and sanitation. However, this theme serves as a starting point, as our discussion extends beyond mere infrastructure. Sustainable access to water and sanitation will only fully benefit all categories of women if their diverse circumstances, especially their differing statuses, are acknowledged and the temptation to homogenize their experiences is resisted. Providing water without recognizing these women’s contributions or safeguarding their rights offers no assurance of lasting positive change.
Internal migration: the first journey within Senegal
Before any journey abroad, there is often a bus ride to Dakar, preceded by the daily chore of fetching water. Across much of rural Senegal, the burden of collecting water falls squarely on women and girls. This arduous task severely impacts their schooling, health, and availability for paid work, acting as a significant factor in pushing young women towards urban centers. Annually, young women depart from the country’s interior for the capital or secondary cities, where they find employment in domestic service, street food vending, or small-scale commerce. These are the women who care for urban households’ children, manage market stalls, clean offices and homes, and prepare meals in countless residences—tasks inherently linked to the availability of water in their employers’ homes. This informal sector, according to the National Agency for Statistics and Demography (ANSD), employs nearly half of Senegal’s workforce, with women forming the majority nationally (51.3% of the informal labor force). However, in the Dakar metropolitan area specifically, they constitute a minority (41.5%) and are concentrated in the most precarious roles, often without contracts or social security. This internal migration, largely overlooked, frequently serves as the initial phase of longer, more complex migratory paths.
Senegal’s complex hospitality: migrants targeted by xenophobic rhetoric
This narrative would be incomplete if it only focused on Senegalese women migrating internally or internationally. For a long time, Senegal has also been a welcoming haven for other Africans. According to the fifth General Population Census (RGPH-5, 2023), 207,791 foreign nationals reside in the country, representing 1.1% of the total population, with 44.3% being women. The vast majority originate from the sub-region, including Guineans (40.3%), Malians (14.9%), Bissau-Guineans (4.4%), Gambians (3.0%), and Mauritanians (2.1%). In certain border regions like Kédougou, individuals born in Mali or Guinea even outnumber Senegalese residents who have returned after being born elsewhere.
However, this long-standing tradition of welcome is now under threat. For several months, a stigmatizing discourse, echoing the rhetoric of the “great replacement” theory, has specifically targeted certain African nationals, particularly ethnic Peulh Guineans. They are often accused of straining public schools or threatening the country’s demographic balance. Some political voices have called for stricter residency conditions and a re-evaluation of birthright citizenship for children born in Senegal to foreign parents. This rhetoric has escalated, revealing a worrying trend comparable to the cyclical xenophobic violence observed in South Africa, where Senegalese residents in Durban have themselves been targeted by anti-immigrant groups.
Foreign women in Senegal: heightened vulnerability
Within this charged atmosphere, migrant women from other African countries face compounded vulnerabilities. Many, like their Senegalese counterparts in internal migration, work in domestic roles or small-scale informal commerce, lacking contracts or social protection. They often depend on an employer or an informal network for their de facto status and, very concretely, for their daily access to water and safe sanitation. When collective suspicion turns against an entire nationality or ethnicity, these women, who are on the front lines in public and domestic spaces, become the most exposed targets for harassment, exploitation, or violence. They are also the least likely to report such incidents, fearing that it might worsen their administrative precarity or draw unwanted attention to their communities. Xenophobia is never gender-neutral; for foreign women, it intensifies an already existing vulnerability stemming from informal work, a lack of protective status, and reliance on the goodwill of a third party for essential services like water, sanitation, and healthcare, rather than guaranteed rights.
Regional shifts: protecting migrant women from Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger
Since January 2025, legal rights for migrant women from Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have become less secure. The continuation of free movement and residency rights for these nationals now hinges on reciprocal political declarations between the two blocs (ECOWAS and AES), rather than the established 1979 ECOWAS Protocol and its institutional and jurisdictional mechanisms, including the ECOWAS Court of Justice. In theory, these political declarations can be revised at any moment by either party, without the same procedural safeguards.
This situation leads to increased vulnerability for undocumented workers. For example, a Malian or Burkina Faso domestic worker who has resided for several years without ever obtaining an Alien Identity Card—a statistically plausible scenario given the high rate of undocumented status among West African migrants—now finds her right to stay dependent on a series of political statements rather than a documented and stable individual status.
The evolving security landscape also demands close attention. In the spring of 2026, the Sahel region experienced deadly attacks, particularly affecting Mali. This escalating security context could potentially lead to an increase in female migration from Mali to Senegal.
This environment necessitates particular vigilance from civil society and unions regarding the practical administrative treatment of Malian, Burkina Faso, and Nigerien nationals. This includes ensuring their access to Alien Identity Cards, healthcare, and their children’s education, especially since their legal foundation has shifted from a stable multilateral protocol to a more fragile bilateral political arrangement.
Deeper roots: colonial borders and internal xenophobia
To truly grasp the current situation, we must move beyond imported analytical frameworks and examine this phenomenon from within. The contemporary African borders are largely artifacts of the Berlin Conference (1884-1885), drawn with little regard for pre-existing kinship, trade, and community networks, as scholar Achille Mbembe has highlighted.
Our fragile postcolonial states, in their quest for national legitimacy, have often resorted to a politics of “autochthony.” Defining who genuinely “belongs to the soil” and who does not becomes a tool to solidify an uncertain national community, often at the cost of excluding those reclassified as foreigners, sometimes after generations of residence. This same dynamic fueled South African Afrophobia and is now re-emerging in Dakar. An anti-racist analysis adapted to the African context must therefore name this phenomenon for what it is: an intra-African xenophobia, a hierarchical categorization of belonging among Black African populations. This, in a new form, perpetuates the colonial logic of dividing peoples, which Frantz Fanon already denounced in The Wretched of the Earth as a major risk of poorly managed independences.
Finally, a truly decolonial gender perspective must be integrated. African feminists Oyèronké Oyèwùmí and Amina Mama have demonstrated how gender categories themselves were reconfigured by colonization and subsequently redeployed by postcolonial nationalist projects to define legitimate national belonging. Foreign women, their fertility, their children born on Senegalese soil, and their presence in households as domestic workers thus become a prime battleground for controlling the boundaries of belonging. It is precisely these women, and the children they bear, who are primarily targeted by challenges to birthright citizenship. Therefore, considering the vulnerability of Senegalese women in internal migration alongside that of African women migrating to Senegal means rejecting a dual error: one that ignores Senegal’s own responsibility towards those it hosts, and another that imposes external frameworks on Africa without adapting them to the real history of its borders and states.
Water and sanitation: an invisible barrier for migrant women
The theme chosen by the African Union for 2026 is not merely another technical slogan; it directly and gender-specifically impacts the condition of migrant women. Firstly, in the peripheral neighborhoods of Dakar where both internal Senegalese migrants and African migrants settle, connections to running water and safe sanitation remain partial. The absence of decent toilets particularly exposes women and girls to insecurity, especially at night. Secondly, the workplace presents its own challenges: for a domestic or family helper residing with an employer, access to water and dignified sanitary facilities depends entirely on the employer’s goodwill, without any labor laws enforcing it—a dependency experienced equally by Senegalese women employed as domestic workers abroad and African women employed as domestic workers in Senegal.
Making the sustainable availability of water and sanitation an objective of Agenda 2063 is, therefore, also an objective for migrant women—those who depart, those who return, and those who arrive from other African countries. A water policy that overlooks migrant settlement areas, or that conditions access to essential networks and services on administrative status, would fail its most vulnerable targets. It is precisely here, in these concrete realities, that a continental agenda intersects with gender justice.
Reciprocal hospitality, shared water: Senegal’s imperative
African Women’s Day should not be confined to a ritualistic homage, nor should the 2026 theme remain merely a summit slogan. Together, they should prompt a simple, two-fold political conclusion: without migrant women—both Senegalese women migrating within their own country and African women residing in Senegal—entire sectors of sub-regional economies would cease to function. Furthermore, without guaranteed access to safe water and dignified sanitation for these same women, whether in their homes, workplaces, or host neighborhoods, the objectives of Agenda 2063 will remain unfulfilled for those who need them most. A concept of téranga (hospitality) that stops at our national borders, or a water policy that neglects these essential women, would ultimately miss the mark.
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