Why Is Afghanistan's Drought Falling Hardest on Women?

Afghanistan is in the middle of one of its worst droughts in decades, and the person walking the extra mile for water, almost always, is a woman. More than half the country is affected, the drought is critical in nineteen provinces, and the daily work of fetching, rationing, and worrying over water has landed on wives, mothers, and daughters who already have the fewest options for doing anything else about it.

What's happening to Afghanistan's water supply right now?

Wells across the country are running dry. In Kabul, officials project the city could lose most of its groundwater by 2030. In Faryab province, about 90 percent of the land is already affected by drought. Farmers who used to draw water from 20 meters down are now sinking wells to 120 meters, when they can afford to dig that deep at all. The UN World Food Programme says 17.4 million people urgently need food assistance as failed harvests stack on top of the water shortage.

An Afghanistan-based journalist, writing for Inter Press Service under conditions where she can't safely use her own name, spent time with women carrying the weight of this. Simin Gul, 35, lost her family's well four years ago; the nearest water source is now a half-hour walk, and the piped network only runs a few hours, two days a week. "When our well ran dry, my immediate concern was whether there would be enough drinking water for our children," she said. Zarmina, 50, watched fifty of her apple and apricot trees die before she managed to keep the rest alive with a spring; her husband could only plant half his farmland this year. "The wealthy can have deep wells dug," she said. "The fields of the poor remain dry." In western Kabul, a woman named Shazia, caring for a family of five, put it simply: "Our lives revolve around water." Another neighbor, Sheila, who's responsible for six children, said the aid organizations that used to install pipes stopped coming years ago.

Why does this drought fall hardest on Afghan women?

Because fetching water has long been considered a woman's job in Afghan households, and the Taliban's restrictions on women's movement, work, and schooling have narrowed almost every other option women might have had to adapt. Men can look for outside work or travel further to find alternative sources; women who are largely confined to the home are left to manage whatever water does or doesn't show up, while also absorbing the physical cost, long walks, heavy containers, back pain, and the added difficulty of managing it all during menstruation. The UN's humanitarian coordination office has also flagged a related problem: a shortage of female doctors and aid workers, worsened by restrictions on women working, is limiting access to maternal care and malnutrition treatment right when both are most needed. It's the same pattern this blog keeps running into: a crisis hits everyone, then gender-based restrictions decide who gets to respond to it and who doesn't, the same question at the heart of whether gender apartheid should count as a crime against humanity.

Why this matters for you

You don't live in Kabul, and your tap almost certainly works. But this isn't a story that stays over there. Climate change hits women hardest everywhere it shows up, not because women are inherently more vulnerable, but because existing inequality decides who absorbs a shock first. UNESCO's 2026 World Water Development Report found that globally, women and girls spend about 250 million hours a day collecting water, three times more than men and boys, and that girls under 15 are nearly twice as likely as boys to be pulled out of school to do it. Afghanistan is an extreme version of a pattern that shows up even in places with far more resources; reservoirs here at home have been hitting record lows too, and water stress tends to find the same fault lines wherever it lands.

One thing you can try today: pick one organization doing water, food, or health work for women and girls inside Afghanistan, CARE International and UNICEF Afghanistan both run active programs there, and give what you can, even five or ten dollars. Then send the IPS story to one friend. These stories struggle for attention precisely because the people in them can't safely put their names on the page; the least we can do is make sure the story travels anyway.

Quote to sit with

"Women are the ones that bear the greatest burden. We are also the ones who nurture societies." — Leymah Gbowee

💌 Sarah