World Water Week 2026.

The Largest Space of Water"

World Water Week 2026 takes place from Sunday, 23 August, through to Thursday, 27 August. During this week, world leaders and experts gather in person in Stockholm, Sweden, as well as virtually around the globe to discuss and resolve global water issues. The World Water Week 2026 is organised by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) and is the largest international meeting of its type each year. There were over 4000 participants from almost 200 countries attending last year's meetings.

This year's theme, "Water for People and Progress", focuses on the concept of achieving water equity, so everyone has access to safe drinking water; and ensuring the planet remains healthy and clean, especially given the climate crisis.

We are a small NGO based in Ghana. We have drilled 25 boreholes. We do not have a delegation participating in Stockholm or giving a keynote speech. However, we have found that you cannot participate in the conversation of how to achieve global water equity if you are not involved in the actual work of providing safe drinking water. Therefore, we will continue to follow World Water Week 2026 remotely and below outlines the topics we would like to hear discussed during this week.

Topics We Would Like to Hear Addressed

Community Ownership

Community ownership is the number one cause of failure for water projects. It is not engineering. Engineering is only a component of building a successful borehole. A borehole without a community that is responsible for owning, funding and maintaining it will ultimately fail.

During World Water Week 2026, SIWI experts and their partners will facilitate several sessions on water governance, diplomacy, business leadership, climate resiliency and sustainable development. This framework fits perfectly as governance is the correct framework for understanding why ownership is important. If there is no community ownership in a borehole then it is essentially a temporary solution until the money runs out. Every WellsForAll well is turned over to a local Water Management Committee once completed. The committee manages the fund, has control over maintenance and makes all decisions regarding the well. Although we did not create this model, we learned it from the mistakes made by others within the industry. We want to hear these lessons clearly defined throughout the week.

2.Verifiable Funding

As an industry, we have failed to establish credible sources of trust in our funding methods. Instead of relying solely on annual reports and accepting statements of donor intent at face value, we should instead look toward developing methods of verifying that funds are being used appropriately.

Although this is the topic we feel is most relevant to our organization, it is also the topic upon which our entire approach was developed. Beginning in 2019, every borehole funded by WellsForAll has included a public proposal for funding, a community-wide vote and a permanent record of verifiable funding. We believe that meaningful discussion regarding funding verification will benefit both donors and organizations such as ours looking forward into larger funding opportunities and the upcoming UN Water Conference in 2026. Verification of funding should be at least as important as credibility.

3.Water and Gender

This topic is particularly important to the communities that WellsForAll serves. Women and girls walk farther and miss more days of school due to accessing unsafe water.

Fortunately, this topic has already been scheduled: Water and Gender will be one of the major topics addressed at World Water Week 2026 in alignment with World Water Day 2026 and the United Nations World Water Development Report. While we appreciate that water and gender is going to receive significant attention, we would prefer that it is considered a fundamental aspect of water policy — not something that occurs in an off-site workshop.

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Where Small Local Organizations Such As Ours Can Fit In

One silent danger present at events of this size — as large as World Water Week — is that the conversation surrounding global water security becomes so dominated by the largest players (the largest budgets), the largest institutions (government agencies, corporations), and the highest levels of policy-making (national governments) — that smaller organizations implementing local solutions in specific areas become background noise.

However, global water security does not occur in some theoretical vacuum. Global water security occurs one village at a time through local implementers who know their Chief, understand their area, communicate in their native tongue, and remain in the village after the ribbon-cutting ceremony for many years beyond. We are one of hundreds of thousands of small organizations working locally to develop safe drinking water solutions for communities. Together we represent whether global policies become operational realities or nothing more than empty words.

It appears that the industry recognizes this reality. Experts from SEI will provide examples from the collaborative learning school that took place in Nigeria during 2025. Those examples include small-scale farmer, local government official, and early-and-late career researcher — which illustrates the type of bottom-up South-South collaboration that views local stakeholders as integral contributors — not peripheral observers. This is the path that we believe the entire industry needs to move forward down.

From Our Perspective — Inside Looking Out

In short, we believe that the big conversation taking place in Stockholm during World Water Week 2026 and the small hand-pumped well located in a remote village in rural Ghana are not two separate entities. Rather they are two different ends of the same tube.

Watching from Ghana

While we plan to watch what happens at World Water Week 2026 — read through each of the agendas, note each commitment and measure them against what we experience daily — we will not be sitting on the sidelines as passive observers. Rather, we will be active participants continuing to drill boreholes for rural communities long after World Water Week 2026 comes to a close.

If World Water Week represents where an industry determines what is important then it follows logically that it will take months before individuals like us realize whether those decisions result in improvements to communities requiring access to safe drinking water. We are committed to making certain that they do.

Here's to a meaningful week of open dialogue — followed by a year of meaningful action.

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