Hydration break. For life.

At the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the referee stops every match twice for water. Twenty-two minutes into each half, play is suspended for three minutes so that footballers can drink, cool down and recover. The breaks apply to every match, regardless of the temperature or weather. 

FIFA's explanation is straightforward: protecting players' welfare and ensuring fair conditions are important enough to be built into the rules of the game.

This is sensible. No serious sporting institution would now argue that an athlete should simply endure dehydration, that access to water is a personal responsibility, or that pausing the game represents an unacceptable loss of time. Heat and dehydration affect concentration, judgement, stamina and physical safety. Water is not incidental to performance. It is one of its preconditions.

But this new televised spectacle also presents Bangladesh with an uncomfortable comparison.

While some of the world's most physically capable people are guaranteed water within a carefully regulated three-minute interval, thousands of women in water-stressed parts of Bangladesh spend hours trying to obtain it. They do not undertake this journey for competitive advantage or physical recovery. They do it because a household cannot function without water and because the systems that should deliver it closer to home often do not.

A recent WaterAid assessment in Paikgacha found that households without water on their premises made an average of 9.3 collection trips a day. At an average of 20.6 minutes per trip, this amounted to 191.6 minutes, or more than three hours, each day. Three hours a day is more than 1,100 hours a year. It is roughly 46 complete 24-hour days. Measured as eight-hour working days, it is more than 140 days of labour.

This is where the language of "water scarcity" becomes inadequate. Scarcity suggests a shortage of a natural resource. Yet the crisis is also a failure of infrastructure, investment, management and political priority. Most importantly, it is a massive, largely unrecorded transfer of time from women to society.

Households receive the water. The economy does not pay for the labour required to obtain it. Public accounts do not record the lost hours. Because this labour is unpaid and usually performed by women, it is treated less as an economic loss than as an ordinary feature of domestic life. It is neither ordinary nor economically neutral.

Water poverty is also time poverty.

Evidence from Bangladesh's coastal belt illustrates the scale and variation of this burden. UNDP reported in 2025 that women in some coastal communities walk two to five kilometres a day, sometimes making two or three trips and spending as much as six hours collecting safe drinking water. The same account describes consequences that extend beyond fatigue: lost income-generating opportunities, disruption to education, unattended children and livestock, and exposure to harassment during the journey.

Another UNDP assessment in coastal Khulna and Satkhira found that women were responsible for collecting drinking water in 74 percent of surveyed households. Only 27 percent of the tube wells tested met the national salinity standard, while 63 percent of the population reported difficulty accessing drinking water. More than half experienced a water crisis lasting over six months.

These figures should change how we discuss water investment. A nearby, functional and safely managed supply is not merely a public-health facility. It is a form of time-saving infrastructure. A bridge reduces travel time. Electricity reduces the hours spent on manual tasks. Safe water close to home performs a similarly productive function, but its economic contribution is routinely underestimated because the people whose time it saves are often women engaged in unpaid work.

This blind spot has consequences. Projects may be judged by the number of installations rather than the reliability of the service. A water point may exist but fail seasonally, produce saline or contaminated water, require long queues, or remain unusable because maintenance arrangements are weak. The relevant question is therefore not simply "Was a water facility constructed?" It is "How many hours of safe and reliable access did it return to people's lives?"

Climate change is intensifying an unequal burden

The crisis is particularly severe in the southwest because freshwater scarcity is not driven by a single cause. Salinity intrusion, cyclones, tidal flooding, damaged water bodies, dry-season shortages, changing rainfall and weak service systems interact with poverty and geography. In the Barind region, drought, declining groundwater availability and rising demand create a different but related form of insecurity. In the hill tracts, difficult terrain, dispersed settlements and seasonal sources can make access heavily physically demanding and uneven.

Climate change does not distribute its burdens according to responsibility. A coastal woman who contributed almost nothing to global heating may lose hours each day because nearby freshwater has become saline. A girl's education may be interrupted not by a formal decision to exclude her, but by the daily necessity of household survival. This is what climate injustice looks like before it becomes a dramatic disaster headline. 

The usual development response is to celebrate resilience. But resilience can become a dangerous political word when it shifts attention from institutional responsibility to individual endurance. Women should not have to become endlessly more resilient to compensate for inadequate services. The objective of public policies and investments must be to reduce the hardship, not to become more impressed by people's capacity to survive it.

FIFA identified a risk to human performance and changed the rules. It did not ask players to become more resilient to dehydration. It created a mandatory pause and incorporated the lost minutes into the match. Bangladesh's water crisis demands a more consequential version of the same logic.

The economics of a shorter journey

Reducing the time spent collecting water can expand women's participation in paid work, enterprise and community decision-making. It can support school attendance, reduce preventable illness, improve health and nutrition, ease unpaid care burdens, and even reduce child marriage. 

Even if only part of that time could be redirected towards paid work, education or rest, the cumulative gain would be substantial. Rest itself should not be dismissed as economically irrelevant. Chronic physical strain and time deprivation damage health, reduce productivity and reinforce inequality.

A household cannot diversify livelihoods effectively if a major share of its available labour is consumed by collecting and managing water. Women cannot participate fully in local planning if basic domestic survival leaves them no discretionary time. Water infrastructure, then, is not a narrow intervention. It is enabling infrastructure. It makes other development investments more likely to work.

Gender inequality built into infrastructure

There is nothing natural about women spending hours collecting water. The burden arises from a combination of gender norms and inadequate infrastructure. Social expectations decide who must fetch the water; planning and investment decisions determine how far that person must travel.

Treating the problem only as one of social attitudes is insufficient. Encouraging men to share household work may reduce inequality within families, but it does not make an unsafe source safe or bring a distant source closer. Conversely, installing a water system without involving women in its design may produce a facility that overlooks the timing, location, safety, affordability and accessibility concerns of those who use it most.

Gender-responsive water solutions must therefore operate at both levels — challenging norms while designing services around and with the experience and priorities of women and girls. That means involving them materially in decisions about technology, placement, tariffs, management and monitoring. A technically functional system can still reproduce inequality. A socially informed system can begin to dismantle it.

What must change

First, Bangladesh needs to measure time poverty as a core water-service indicator. Data should capture the total daily time spent travelling, waiting and collecting water, disaggregated by sex, age, disability, location and season. 

Second, climate-vulnerable regions require differentiated solutions — rainwater harvesting in one location; managed pond systems, piped networks, desalination or groundwater recharge elsewhere. Technology should follow local hydrogeology, not the convenience of a standard project template. 

Third, public investment must cover operation and maintenance, not only construction. A non-functional water facility is not an asset. It is a broken promise. Fourth, climate finance should treat drinking-water security as one of the central adaptation infrastructures.

Finally, accountability must be defined by service outcomes — not how many schemes have been inaugurated, but whether safe water is available throughout the year and whether the time burden on women has actually fallen.

Shifting the long-standing outlook

FIFA identified a risk to human performance and changed the rules. It did not ask players to become more resilient to dehydration. It created a mandatory pause and incorporated the lost minutes into the match. Bangladesh's water crisis demands a more consequential version of the same logic.

The hours women spend securing water must no longer be regarded as free, inevitable or invisible. They are hours taken from education, income, care, civic participation and rest. A hydration break can alter the momentum of a football match. Reliable access to safe water can alter the trajectory of a life.

On the pitch, three minutes are protected because water sustains performance. Beyond the stadium, millions of hours must be protected — because change starts with water.

Plaban Gongopaddhay is the Communications Coordinator at WaterAid Bangladesh, and Rupkatha Nasrullah is a young professional at WaterAid Bangladesh.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of The Business Standard, WaterAid Bangladesh or any affiliated organisation.