The continent of Africa pauses each July 31st to honor its women, a tradition rooted in the historic 1962 Dar es Salaam women’s conference that later led to the creation of the Pan-African Women’s Organization in 1974. This year, the African Union has designated 2026 under the theme of water: “Ensuring sustainable access to clean water and safe sanitation to achieve the goals of Agenda 2063.”

In Senegal, two truths collide on this day: the nation’s economy thrives on the backs of women whose labor often goes unnoticed, and these same women bear the heaviest burdens of water scarcity and inadequate sanitation—the very issues the continental agenda seeks to address. From internal migrants working as domestic helpers in Dakar’s households to small-scale traders in bustling markets, their contributions are indispensable yet systematically overlooked in policy discussions and public debates. While the right to clean water and decent sanitation remains a distant dream for many, their daily struggles reveal a deeper crisis of recognition and dignity.

Rural roots, urban realities

For countless young women in Senegal’s rural heartlands, the day begins before dawn—not with schoolbooks, but with the arduous task of fetching water. This daily ritual, falling disproportionately on women and girls, drains time, health, and educational opportunities, pushing many toward urban centers like Dakar in search of survival. Each year, young women migrate from rural areas to the capital or secondary cities, finding work in domestic service, street vending, or informal trade (Lo, Coulibaly, Sakho, 2014). They become the invisible backbone of urban households: caring for children, managing market stalls, cleaning offices, and preparing meals. Yet their labor is tied to the very households they serve, where access to water is a prerequisite for their work. According to Senegal’s National Statistics Agency (ANSD), informal employment—where women make up 51.3% of the workforce nationally but only 41.5% in Dakar—employs nearly half of the country’s labor force. These workers, predominantly without contracts or social protections, represent the first step in longer migratory journeys, internal yet largely unacknowledged.

Senegal’s dual role: host and home to migrants

Senegal’s hospitality extends beyond its borders. Long recognized as a haven for African migrants, the country is home to 207,791 foreigners (2023 census), representing 1.1% of the population, with women comprising 44.3% of this group. The majority hail 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, migrants from Mali or Guinea outnumber returning Senegalese residents. This long-standing tradition of welcome now faces growing hostility.

In recent months, a dangerous rhetoric—echoing the dangerous ‘great replacement’ theory—has targeted specific African communities, particularly Guinean Fulani migrants, accused of overburdening public schools or threatening demographic balance. Political voices have demanded stricter residency conditions and the abolition of birthright citizenship for children of foreign parents. This escalating discourse mirrors xenophobic violence seen in South Africa, where Senegalese migrants in Durban have faced similar persecution. The consequences for migrant women are severe.

Double vulnerability: gender and migration

In this climate, foreign women in Senegal face compounded vulnerabilities. Like their Senegalese counterparts in internal migration, they often work in informal domestic or small-scale trade sectors, devoid of contracts or social protections. Their access to clean water and sanitation at home and work depends on employers or informal networks—leaving them exposed to harassment, exploitation, or violence, especially when collective suspicion targets entire nationalities or ethnic groups. Xenophobia is never gender-neutral; for foreign women, it exacerbates existing precarity tied to informal labor, lack of legal status, and dependence on third-party goodwill for basic services. The absence of guaranteed rights to water and sanitation only deepens their insecurity.

Regional shifts: CEDEAO-AES rupture and its human cost

Since January 2025, the free movement rights of Malian, Burkinabe, and Nigerien women in Senegal no longer rest on the binding 1979 CEDEAO Protocol, but on fragile reciprocal political declarations. These agreements, theoretically revocable at any time, offer no procedural guarantees. For undocumented domestic workers from these countries—many of whom have lived in Senegal for years without obtaining foreign identity cards—the loss of legal stability threatens access to residency, healthcare, and education for their children. The Sahel’s volatile security situation, marked by deadly attacks in Mali in early 2026, may further increase female migration flows toward Senegal. This calls for urgent vigilance from civil society and unions to ensure these women’s rights are not collateral damage in shifting regional politics.

Colonial borders and the politics of belonging

Understanding this moment requires examining xenophobia not through imported lenses, but through Senegal’s own history. The continent’s colonial borders, drawn at the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, severed pre-existing kinship, trade, and cultural networks—a reality highlighted by scholars like Achille Mbembe. Postcolonial states, seeking national legitimacy, have often resorted to policies of ‘autochthony,’ distinguishing between those ‘truly from the soil’ and others, often after generations of presence. This logic fuels intra-African xenophobia, a hierarchy among Black African populations that perpetuates colonial divisions, as Frantz Fanon warned in The Wretched of the Earth.

Adding a gendered lens, feminist scholars like Oyèronké Oyèwùmí and Amina Mama argue that colonialism reshaped gender categories, later repurposed by nationalist projects to define national belonging. Foreign women, their fertility, and their children born in Senegal become key sites of control over national borders. The push to revoke birthright citizenship disproportionately targets them and their families, revealing how gender and migration intersect in defining who belongs.

Water and sanitation: the invisible frontier for migrant women

The AU’s 2026 theme is not merely technical—it is deeply intertwined with the lived realities of migrant women. In Dakar’s peripheral neighborhoods where migrants settle, access to piped water and sanitation remains partial, exposing women and girls to nighttime insecurity. At work, domestic workers living with employers have no legal recourse to demand water or decent toilets—leaving them dependent on their employers’ goodwill. This dependency mirrors the plight of Senegalese domestic workers abroad and African women employed as domestic workers in Senegal. Making clean water and sanitation a continental priority without addressing the specific needs of migrant women in their neighborhoods and workplaces risks missing the most vulnerable.

A hospitality that must be mutual

African Women’s Day should not be reduced to ritual homage, nor should the 2026 theme remain a summit slogan. Together, they demand a clear political conclusion: without migrant women—whether Senegalese moving within their own country or Africans settling in Senegal—entire sectors of the subregion’s economies would collapse. Without guaranteed access to clean water and dignified sanitation for these women in their homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods, Agenda 2063’s goals will remain unattainable for those who need them most. Hospitality that stops at national borders, or a water policy that overlooks these women, will fail the same test.