Who Sees What Underwater? A Justice Journey Across Asia

Gin Dupont is a young gender, water, and climate professional. She is a Young Scientific Programme Committee member for World Water Week 2026, and is organising a seminar series on Advancing Gender Equity and Transformative Approaches in Water.

Rain hadn’t yet come, and the Cambodian farmer had a choice to make. Continue harvesting or spend the next few weeks digging a water tank by hand. He chose the tank. It’s one of many times when a question about water turns into one about justice.

My partner and I arrived on the farmer’s coffee and cacao plantation two months into six months of travel across Asia. Together we continued digging the tank, watched stunning sunsets, had great coffee, and talked. About coffee, from planting to selling, about climate change impacts, and much more.

I still think about the farm, and it was on my mind during my first session with Bapon Fakhruddin (Water and Climate Leader at the Green Climate Fund), my mentor as part of the Young Scientific Programme Committee (YSPC) to World Water Week. His question to me was: “Reflecting on your trip, what does the water sector look like to you, and what would you like it to look like?”

A whirlwind of thoughts came to me. Water had surfaced in fragments throughout my travels. In Jaisalmer, a city in the Indian Thar Desert, I learned that houses were built without cement and water. In the Philippines, a healthy coral reef was the most beautiful thing I saw. But what touched me most wasn’t water, it was people. The Cambodian farmer paid too little and working against a changing climate he didn’t cause. Women in India’s tea plantations, working long hours for almost nothing, while I stood a few metres away admiring the view.

A few days after my call with Bapon, whilst trekking through Nepal’s breathtaking mountains, I sat in a cold hut after a long day of hiking. I tried to focus on water. My mind went back to a story a classmate from Morocco once told me.

In a rural village, a pipeline had been installed so women wouldn’t have to walk far for water. A few weeks later, it was destroyed by those same women. I didn’t understand at first. Surely a pipeline was good? My classmate explained; the walk had been the one time the women were allowed to leave the house, to gather, to talk, to bring tea and wait their turn together. What looks like a solution to one person can miss another person’s experience entirely. Water carries social norms that must be accounted for.

I’m not the only one with blind spots, unfortunately. During the design of a WASH project proposal, I flagged two things; the sanitation plan – a hole in the ground – gave no thought to women’s safety and needs, and the water plan would only add to their workload. Another classmate told me I had grown up in a privileged country without a sense of community, that I didn’t know what I was talking about. It stung, but he was right. I hadn’t lived in the community I was designing for and couldn’t claim to know it. It took me longer to realise that he hadn’t lived it as a woman either. Too often, water and sanitation are seen as infrastructure, the social dimensions around the services simply invisible.

Sitting there in that Nepalese hut, I thought about what I would want the sector to look like. It became a wish list. Equal access. Recognition and a real say in decisions for the women, making their knowledge visible. A planet people take care of for the nature that suffers and for the people who pay first for climate change. Then it struck me. Every item on my list was a different element of justice. Distributional, recognitional, procedural, environmental, climate.

I’ve always cared much about injustice, and that sensitivity never left. It’s what eventually brought water and me together. It’s why pipes interest me less than what they hide. It’s why what stayed with me from six months in Asia was never really about water. It was about injustice.

I’m grateful to Bapon for posing the question that came full circle in that cold hut in Nepal.

Looking ahead, my goal is simple to say and harder to live. To keep uplifting stories that remain hidden, and to keep fighting for whose effort, knowledge, or opportunity goes unseen. In the small things close to me and in the places further away where injustice touches me just as deeply.

Attending World Water Week 2026 as part of the YSPC, I hope to find people who share my vision, to learn from those already further along in the fight for justice than I am, and to find opportunities to turn what I’ve written here into practice.

Interested in reading more from World Water Week? “Water for climate action” is an Editorial in |PLOS Water written by Jon Lane, Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), and Chair of the Scientific Programme Committee for World Water Week, reflecting on the key themes of the SIWI seminar series from 2025.