RWSN at the 43rd UN Water Meeting in Rome

Bringing Field Experience into the Preparatory Process for the 2026 UN Water Conference

In March 2026, The Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) participated in the 43rd UN Water Meeting, held over three days at IFAD headquarters in Rome. As an official UN Water Partner (one of only 39 organizations with that status) RWSN has recognized standing to participate in these intergovernmental preparatory processes, deliver oral interventions, and submit written contributions to official policy documents. 

This article explains what RWSN brought to Rome, what happened there, and why it matters for the communities RWSN serves. 

Context: RWSN, Skat Foundation, and UN Water

Before turning to the meeting itself, a word on institutional roles.

RWSN is a global knowledge network with more than 17,000 members across 190 countries. It is hosted by Skat Foundation – a St. Gallen-based Swiss NGO that provides the secretariat and staff support that keeps the network running. Valérie Bertschy, Knowledge Management Officer at Skat Foundation, represented RWSN in Rome in her capacity as secretariat staff. 

UN Water is the United Nations inter-agency coordination mechanism for all freshwater-related issues, including sanitation. Its Members Meeting are held twice yearly, typically in Rome, and serve as a key preparatory forum for major global water policy processes. RWSN’s status as a UN Water Partner gives it formal access to these meetings – a recognition of its role as a credible, evidence-based voice for rural water across the global governance architecture. 

The 43rd Members Meeting was the second major preparatory milestone for the 2026 UN Water Conference, which will only be the third UN Water Conference since 1977. The stakes are high: the conference is expected to produce a framework shaping global water governance well into the post-2030 period. 

The Conference Framework: Six Interactive Dialogues

The Abu Dhabi conference will be structured around six Interactive Dialogues (IDs), each with member state co-chairs and UN agency co-convenors. These dialogues formed the backbone of discussions throughout the three days in Rome:

• (a) Water for People – co-chaired by Ghana and Switzerland
• (b) Water for Prosperity – co-chaired by China and Spain
• (c) Water for Planet – co-chaired by Egypt and Japan
• (d) Water for Cooperation – co-chaired by Zambia and Finland
• (e) Water in Multilateral Processes – co-chaired by Germany and Mexico
• (f) Investments for Water – co-chaired by France and South Africa

Participants of the 43rd UN Water Meeting in Rome

What RWSN Brought to Rome

RWSN’s participation was grounded in substantial preparation ahead of the meeting. RWSN produced a gap analysis comparing its Draft Position Paper against each of the six concept paper outlines, and prepared six tailored oral interventions (one per dialogue) designed to introduce rural water priorities into the intergovernmental discussion.

RWSN’s advocacy priorities for the conference center on five core asks:

•  Professionalize rural water service delivery through national competency frameworks, results-based contracting, and support for professional associations.
• Close the rural-urban financing gap, including recognition of full life-cycle costs and explicit rural allocation targets in national financing strategies.
• Strengthen groundwater governance, including regulation of drilling and hardware quality, integration into national water planning, adoption of the WHO Small Water Supplies Guidelines (2024), and implementation of AMCOW’s Strategic Programme on Groundwater (approved September 2025).
• Invest in data, evidence, and learning systems, with rural/urban disaggregation as a minimum accountability requirement. 
• Center women and young professionals as agents of change, with dedicated professional development pathways and gender-disaggregated workforce data. 

Across all five asks, groundwater governance emerged as the most cross-cutting priority. Groundwater supplies approximately 75% of domestic water demand across Africa and is the primary rural water source across much of the Global South – yet it remains underregulated and poorly integrated into national water planning and investment frameworks in most countries.

Three Days in Rome

The meeting combined plenary sessions on de SDG 6 synthesis process and the conference preparatory timeline, a two-panel session with co-chairs from all six Interactive Dialogues, and a World Café workshop on Day 3 allowing deeper engagement with the UN agency co-convenors drafting the concept papers. 

RWSN delivered its prepared intervention in the panel on Water for People, making the case that groundwater governance is a foundational gap in the dialogue’s current framing: 

The intervention received a direct response from the Swiss co-chair, who acknowledged that groundwater governance spans multiple sub-themes within the dialogue and committed to including RWSN in the working group discussions that will shape the concept papers.

The remaining interventions – prepared for all six dialogues but now always called upon in the room – were preserved for written submission to the relevant co-chairs and co-convenors in the weeks following the meeting.

The World Café workshop on Day 3 offered the most substantive exchanges of the three days. RWSN participated in all six tables, contributing on themes including: the role of workforce professionalization and regulation as prerequisites for bankable rural water investment; the AMCOW Strategic Programme on Groundwater as a model of regionally-grounded multilateral commitment; and the contribution that knowledge networks like RWSN contribute to water cooperation across borders – a form of collaboration that sits alongside, and supports, the formal transboundary frameworks that typically dominate cooperation dialogues. 

Throughout the meeting, RWSN’s positions found alignment with contributions from other partners, including IWMI, WHO, and UNICEF, on issues ranging from the rural data gap in the SDG 6 synthesis to the need for locally-anchored capacity development over top-down training programs.

Why This Matters

The 2026 UN Water Conference will produce a framework shaping global water investment, policy, and governance for years beyond 2030. The concept papers being drafted for each Interactive Dialogue are not bureaucratic formalities – they define which issues are prioritized, which gaps are named, and which actors are engaged in implementation.

Rural water – the water that reaches the people furthest from urban infrastructure, often through groundwater systems and community-managed supply points – has historically been underrepresented in global water governance frameworks. When those frameworks are written in ways that implicitly assume urban infrastructure contexts, the communities RWSN serves bear the consequences for years. 

RWSN’s case in Rome was straightforward: the evidence base exists, the solutions are known, and the global policy frameworks being build now either embed rural water explicitly or risk leaving it out. Bringing that case into the rooms where concept papers are shaped (and building the relationships with co-chairs and co-convenors that give it traction) is what the Rome mission was about. 

Looking Ahead

Written submissions to the co-convenors of three Interactive Dialogues followed the Rome meeting, developing RWSN’s positions in more depth and ensuring that interventions not delivered in the room reached the right hands. 

The preparatory calendar between Rome and Abu Dhabi includes the Dushanbe Conference (May 2026), the High-Level Political Forum in New York (July 2026) – where the SDG 6 synthesis report will be launched – and the 44th UN Water Meeting in Rome (October 2026), which will be the final preparatory gathering before the conference itself. 

Skat Foundation, through the RWSN secretariat, is committed to sustaining this engagement through to Abu Dhabi and beyond. The communities RWSN represents have everything to gain from a global water framework that explicitly names their needs – and too much to lose from one that does not.