Water Is Not a Commodity – It Is a Right

Bern, Switzerland – A Blue Community Film Screening and Panel Discussion on World Water day

On March 18, 2026, the Alpine Museum in Bern opened its doors to an evening that was equal parts documentary, dialogue, and call to action. Organized by Blue Community NGOs on the occasion of World Water Day, the event brought together more than 20 participants for a screening of Marcher sur l’eau, a documentary by Aïssa Maïga, followed by a panel discussion on climate change, water access, and global responsibility. 

The Film: A Village, a Crisis, a Mirror

Marcher sur l’eau (Walking on Water) portrays the village of Batiste in Niger – a community on the front lines of a crisis it did not create. The film follows its inhabitants, many of them women and children, as they navigate the daily reality of water scarcity: long walks, unreliable sources, and a future made increasingly precarious by a chaining climate. Filmed in French with German subtitles, the documentary was as visually striking as it was politically sobering. 

For many in the audience, the film made abstract statistics viscerally real. The Sahel is not a distant cautionary tale – it is today’s reality for millions of people who have contributed almost nothing to the greenhouse gas emissions driving the crisis they now live with every day. 

The Panel: Five Voices, One Urgent Question

Following the screening, moderator Sarah Jäggi (Blue Community) led a 55-minute panel discussion with four partitioners from the water and development sector:

• Valérie Bertschy, Skat Foundation
• Daniel Maselli, independent expert
• Delphine Magara, Swiss Water Partnership Youth
• Michèle Heeb, Helvetas

The conversation moved through six thematic areas – from immediate reactions to the film, to climate projections, structural causes of water insecurity, lessons from the field, and the specific responsibility of Switzerland and civil society organizations. 

Key Themes from the Discussion

Climate change is already here. The panelists were unequivocal: in regions like the Sahel, and in sub-Saharan Africa more broadly, the consequences of climate change are not a future scenario – they are present reality. Rainy seasons are shifting and shortening. Groundwater levels are declining. Communities that once had reliable access to water now face months of acute shortage. What used to be a drought is becoming the baseline. 

Access, not availability, is the core problem. One of the film’s central insights – that water exists, but access is unequally distributed – resonated throughout the panel. The structural causes are well-documented: inadequate infrastructure, weak institutions, historical legacies that continue to shape resource distribution, and increasing pressure from private interests on water systems. When water is treated as a commodity rather than a right, it is invariably the poorest who lose access first. 

International cooperation must be rethought. The panelists reflected critically on the track record of development projects in the water sector. Too many initiatives have been designed from the outside, funded on short timelines, and then left to fend for themselves. The pump works for five years, then breaks – and no one knows how to fix it. Sustainable approaches, by contrast, invest in local ownership: community water committees that are elected, managed, and financed by the communities themselves; technologies that can be repaired with locally available knowledge and parts; tariff models that include rather than exclude poorer households. 

The gap between global policy and local reality. A recurring theme was the structural disconnect between international declarations and on-the-ground implementation. Frameworks, resolutions, and climate targets are adopted at the global level – but the translation into practice repeatedly fails, not because communities lack the will, but because the connective tissue between policy and implementation is missing. What the sector needs are actors who can move fluently between both worlds: understanding, what a UN resolution means for a water committee in Zambia, and ensuring that what water committees in Zambia experience informs the next UN resolution. 

Women at the center. In many of the regions discussed, it is women who bear the physical burden of water collection – hours of walking each day that crowd out education, economic activity, and rest. The panelists emphasized that sustainable water solutions require women’s meaningful participation in decision-making structures, not merely their presence as beneficiaries. Gender equality and water access are not parallel issues; they are the same issue. 

Switzerlands responsibility.  The event took place in Bern, a few hundred meters from the federal institutions that shape Swiss foreign and climate policy. The panelists did not let that geography go unremarked. Switzerland is a wealthy country with a historically high carbon footprint, the host of major international organizations, and a country with a long tradition of development cooperation. That combination of privilege and capacity, the discussion suggested, comes with obligations – not just to fund water projects, but to advocate for climate justice at the international level and to translate those commitments into domestic policy. 

Key Takeaways

The evening surfaced a set of clear, actionable conclusions:

• Water is a human right, recognized by the UN since 2010, and must be treated as such in national and international law – not as a market commodity. 
• Community-based water governance works when communities have real ownership, appropriate technology, and sustainable financing. This is not a romantic ideal; it is what decades of field experience consistently show. 
• Climate financing must explicitly target water in vulnerable regions. This is not development aid – it is climate justice. 
• The Blue Community movement matters as a mechanism for building political pressure from the ground up. Every city, institution, or organization that declares water a human right and backs that declaration with concrete commitments shifts the political landscape, incrementally but meaningfully. 
• The sector needs better connective tissue – people and organizations that can bridge the gap between global policy and local implementation, and ensure that experience from the field shapes the frameworks being write-in Geneva and New York. 

About the Event

The screening and panel were organized by Blue Community NGOs as part of World Water Day 2026. Partner organizations included HEKS/EPER, Medair, Skat Foundation, and Morija. Skat Foundation participated in the panel discussion and contributed its field experience from long-term water programs in Tanzania and Zambia, as well as its work as Secretariat of the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN).