The myth of meritocracy: why universal water access is a prerequisite for a fair society

In developed economies, water has become a victim of its own social success. For those with universal access to it, a form of cognitive dissonance has taken hold: we fret over looming threats of scarcity while enjoying an uninterrupted, completely dependable supply. Just turn on the tap, and the problem evaporates – along with the idea that water is inextricably linked to equality of opportunity. For many in the Global North, water scarcity is at best a humanitarian concern, and at worst an abstract, geographically distant problem with little grounding in reality. But this sense of security is misleading. Water has not ceased to be a prerequisite for equality; it has simply slipped out of sight in some places. 2.1 billion people without reliable access to clean water This year’s United Nations World Water Development Report, presented by UNESCO on World Water Day, is entitled “Water for All: Equality of Rights and Opportunities”. The title is not just a stylistic flourish, as the report underscores that access to clean, safe and affordable water – alongside the equitable and meaningful participation of women in water management – is essential to abating poverty and building healthier, fairer societies. Percentage of the population with access to drinking water. WHO, CC BY The latest figures from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme are hard to brush aside. In 2024, 2.1 billion people still lacked access to safely managed drinking water services, while 3.4 billion lacked safely managed sanitation and 1.7 billion did not have basic hygiene facilities at home. Progress between 2015 and 2024 has been clear, but the UN warns that the current pace would need to increase eight-fold to achieve universal access to safe drinking water by 2030. The gender imbalance is especially stark. Globally, 26% of women and girls – 1.1 billion people – lack access to safely managed drinking water. Across 53 countries with available data, women and girls spend 250 million hours a day collecting water, more than three times as much as men and boys. Read more: Time and trauma: what fetching water costs women and girls in Nairobi’s informal settlements The myth of meritocracy At a time marked by a fracturing world order, rising costs of critical infrastructure, mounting pressure on public finances, and intensifying competition for strategic resources, water no longer merely delivers wellbeing; it also distributes risk, time, productivity, and life chances. It spills over sectoral boundaries and sits squarely at the heart of debates on food security, climate resilience, industrial competitiveness and social cohesion. What we need to address is therefore not just the physical availability of the resource, but also how it translates into real opportunities. Beyond asking how much water there is and who has access to it, the politically salient question is this: How does water distribute opportunities within a society? Whose time does it free up, and whose burdens does it increase? Who does it protect, and who does it expose? Who is able to study, work, rest, care, or take risks – and who is not? The answers to these questions may seem to lie in a broad concept of “equality of opportunity”. But this idea is often used uncritically, and offers little more than a convenient excuse for ignoring the ever-deepening inequalities that determine success or failure. The work of political philosopher Michael Sandel explores this. He shows how blind faith in meritocracy treats success as purely individual, glossing over the extent to which it rests on inherited advantages, public goods, institutional contexts and invisible labour. We can visualise this as a running race, where athletes compete under identical conditions. Each theoretically has an “equal opportunity” to win, but some are well-rested and others already exhausted. When the starting gun fires, the outcome is already decided. Water embodies this critique. Meritocracy cannot hold where starting conditions are so uneven. It breaks down when millions of girls and women continue to lose hours of education, employment or rest fetching water. Nor can it hold when sanitation is absent, undermining health, safety, privacy and continuity in schooling. It also fails when the domestic infrastructure of wellbeing – drinking, cleaning, cooking, caring – falls disproportionately on those who already have less time, income or recognition. The UNESCO report’s data leaves little room for metaphor; it calls instead for a rethink of the moral grammar of merit. Water shapes life trajectories The work of the 2019 Nobel laureate economists Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer is particularly illuminating here. They showed that inequality is not only evident in large macroeconomic aggregates, but also in the accumulation of small frictions, the seemingly minor costs that, over time, warp life trajectories. Water sits at the centre of this challenge, not as a sectoral footnote, but as a critical factor in ensuring that education, health and work become more than abstract promises. Those living in developed economies, where water services are universally provided, might believe that the link between water and gender is confined to low-income contexts. But that would be to mistake the problem’s absence for its transformation. People in wealthier nations may not have to walk long distances to access water, but inequality manifests itself elsewhere: in the ability to pay, in resilience to droughts and floods, in exposure to substandard housing, in the capacity to absorb service disruptions, in the everyday burden of care, and in representation in decision-making bodies. In middle and low-income countries, by contrast, the harsher reality of having to travel to fetch water persists. There, water shapes not only wellbeing but life trajectories. Where supply does not reach the home, women and girls bear the burden in seven out of ten households. And where adequate sanitation is lacking, risks to health, safety, and educational continuity rise sharply. In such contexts, water is not just another public service. It is where social inequality, institutional fragility and the gendered division of labour converge. Water underpins society Water alone will not magically solve inequality, but it is a moral and political litmus test. A society can repeat the mantra of merit until it is blue in the face, but it cannot plausibly call itself fair while distributing basic goods so unevenly. And that, ultimately, is the most inconvenient truth of the UNESCO report. Water is not merely a question of critical infrastructure, tariffs or technology. It is a question of the kind of society we wish to build, of whether equality will remain an illusion or become a material reality that frees up time, health, safety, and dignity on a broad scale. In a world shaped by geoeconomic uncertainty and competition for essential resources, the answer can no longer be rhetorical. A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!