With women and girls disproportionately affected by poor water and sanitation services, Professor Juliet Willetts, winner of IWA’s Gender Diversity in Water Award, discusses her experiences working to support equitable access. By Erika Yarrow-Soden.
The winner of several awards for research excellence, the 2024 IWA Gender Diversity in Water Award recipient, and listed in the Australian Financial Review’s ‘100 Women of Influence’, Juliet Willetts is Professor and Research Director at the University of Technology Sydney, Institute For Sustainable Futures, Australia, where she leads applied research to improve development policy and practice, addressing social justice and supporting sustainable development.
A passionate advocate for inclusive access to water and sanitation, she traces this back to her early career motivation of supporting those without access to these basic human rights. “Ideas of inclusion and reaching out to people have always been at the centre,” she says. “From my very early experiences in the sector, it was clear that there is an unequal impact and burden on women who do not have adequate water and sanitation services.”
Driven to address these inequalities, more than 15 years ago – supported by a research grant from the Australian government – Willetts partnered with the International Women’s Development Agency and two civil society organisations on a project called Gender in Pacific WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene). This looked at interventions in the Pacific, how they could be strengthened, and how inequalities could be adjusted.
“On that project, I initially had a lot of misgivings about working on gender equality in cultures that were different from my own,” she explains. “I was concerned that we may be bringing across our feminist values and imposing them on communities. But that research project showed me that people were open and interested to question whether they were happy with current roles and dynamics, and how things might be different – better; both women and men were keen for things to change.”
Willetts found that water and sanitation was a great entry point for addressing inequalities at national and household scale. “The women we spoke to already had a strong role at home, but not in the community and in other forums,” she explains. “They were not being trained to fix the system, but they were the ones who noticed when the system was down, and they were the ones who suffered when it was broken.” Part of the solution was to challenge preconceived ideas of male and female roles. “We discovered that water and sanitation could be a real entry point for wider change in terms of social dynamics,” she says.
In more recent work with colleagues in Nepal, Bhutan and Laos, she and her team and partners found that purposefully enabling transformative leadership can support people to become change-makers and inspire others through the way they live their lives, and that embedding such approaches to expand technical water and sanitation programmes was successful in shifting people’s ideas and driving societal change.
Water and sanitation gap
Spending her career focused on water and sanitation in low- and middle-income contexts, Willetts is acutely aware of the impact of climate change on the most vulnerable. “Working in places like Bangladesh, where some locations were inundated for multiple months of the year, with people living on small islands, for example, you see people who are barely able to survive, never mind have water and sanitation as a basic service,” she says.
She highlights particular challenges in drought prone regions, as she recalls working recently in East Timor when, at the end of the dry season, springs were dry and people, primarily women, were walking for hours up and down mountains to get water. “I think people in high-income countries assume that’s something of the past,” she says. “But these challenges persist, it’s just that they are not necessarily visible to everyone.”
Another complex area when it comes to water and sanitation are informal settlements. “Urban areas have proliferated over the past decades,” says Willetts. “People are living without land tenure. In these circumstances it is difficult to work with governments to provide services and, in many cases, authorities don’t want these settlements to remain. There is the dilemma that by providing services people can be encouraged to stay living in these locations. But it is important to remember that we are talking about human beings and their ability to live on this planet. I believe everyone has the basic human right to water and sanitation, wherever they are living.”
Drivers for progress
Despite the challenging global picture, Willetts has seen successes, especially at sub-national level, when working with local governments. “Working at this level, the main blocks to progress tend to be capacity and financing,” she says. “Budgeting processes are needed to ensure that finances are available and spent where they are most required, and that support is available to ensure the necessary technical skills can be developed.
“People often assume that to deliver water and sanitation you just need engineers, but you really need a team with a diverse set of skills. When you are delivering a service to a society, it is much more than an engineering task. A range of skills are required if we are to have inclusive processes that reach everyone, and have good communication and engagement with service users; if we are to address complex challenges such as climate change; and if we are to build skills at a local level. In places such as Cambodia, Bhutan and Vietnam, we’ve seen changes happening over time that give me hope that step-by-step change is possible.”
Willetts believes water and sanitation are public services and human rights that are critical to progress, and that governments have a mandate to deliver. “Those ideas for me are fundamental and we need to keep them front and centre.” She explains that climate resilience discussions are also changing from a focus primarily on risk and mitigation to an understanding that we need transformational change that works across sectors, that looks at synergies across water supply, sanitation and drainage systems, and that takes account of whole systems. “If we’re working in urban areas and working on the water cycle as a whole, we need to adopt more circular approaches. This will be essential if we are to continue to support resilient services in the face of climate change. Big changes will be required,” she says.
Looking at the global picture, especially now in 2025, with major changes to the global development funding landscape, Willetts is highly concerned. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are unlikely to be achieved by the 2030 deadline. “You find people saying that the SDGs, with their focus on safely managed services, are too ambitious, but they are simply what we can and should be aiming for,” says Willetts. Rather than hand wringing, she calls for greater acknowledgement of advances made by some governments, especially progress on sanitation services in places such as Cambodia and parts of India, which elsewhere are falling behind water services. “Poor sanitation is contaminating waterways, raw water inputs and groundwater,” she says – a situation that is impacting health, resilience and economies, from which no one is immune.
Gender Diversity in Water Award
On being awarded IWA’s Gender Diversity in Water Award, Willetts is particularly humble. Coming from a background rooted in diversity, equality and inclusion she confides that she had reservations about her submission, given that she has benefited from a privileged background – coming from Australia – and has enjoyed excellent work opportunities. “I am acutely aware that there are people in the Global South who are on the frontline, dealing with huge inequalities every day of their lives,” she says.
Her response to the honour is to credit the great people with whom she has been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work within partnerships that have driven progress, and the dynamic of the collective. This notion of a collective energy that’s embedded in respect, inclusivity and equality is what must be realised if the global population is to receive these most critical of human rights. Time may be tight for the world to achieve the SDGs, but by drawing on this collective will, we can create a world where everyone can live in dignity and better health.
