SWA’s role in the UN Water Conference: From 2023 to 2026
In December, the United Arab Emirates and Senegal will co-host the 2026 UN Water Conference in the UAE. The last conference—the first in more than 40 years and co-hosted by the Netherlands and Tajikistan—took place in 2023. It aimed at accelerating global action toward targets of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 on water and sanitation ahead of the 2030 deadline. Here’s what the partnership has focused on in the years since.
Water Action Agenda / commitment tracking. SWA's own Water Action Agenda pledge was to keep working on its Mutual Accountability Mechanism (MAM) and open it up to "all sector actors, SWA partner or not," so that Water Action Agenda commitments could be tracked and followed up rather than left as one-off pledges. That commitment came with concrete deliverables — three MAM Global Reports (2024, 2027, 2030), the first of which has already been published. The MAM now tracks more than 560 commitments (up from 194 when it was launched in 2019) across governments, civil society, utilities, donors, and development banks, making it the sector's only accountability process open to every type of actor.
UN System Strategy / mainstreaming water and sanitation. SWA is one of the core partners of the Heads of State Initiatives (HoSI) — alongside the Netherlands, UK FCDO, UNICEF, WaterAid, and IRC WASH — which launched at the 2023 conference specifically to mobilize presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs to mainstream water, sanitation and hygiene into national political priorities. SWA provides secretariat support to country compacts and brings nearly 500 partners across governments, UN agencies, financiers, civil society, and the private sector into that effort. Since the UN Water Conference of 2023, more than five countries have announced and are implementing initiatives or compacts at Head of State/Government level, several have joined and are preparing their own initiatives.
Water for Cooperation / partnerships. SWA's role runs through individual country compacts: it supported the development of Ghana's presidential WASH compact (with accountability built around SWA and GLAAS governance frameworks), supported Nepal's accession to HoSI at the 2025 Financing for Development conference in Seville, and was a signatory partner (with the Netherlands, Germany, Japan UNICEF) on South Sudan's water and sanitation compact. We are also working alongside emerging initiatives such as Water Forward to strengthen the broader reform pathways toward water security.
Water for Sustainable Development / Water Action Decade mid-term review. SWA has positioned continuity and implementation, not new pledge volume, as the real measure of the Decade's mid-term progress. The sector built strong "architecture for making commitments" in 2023 but still has no process for verifying them — and that the test of the 2026 Conference is whether the 2023 commitments were kept, not how many new ones are announced.
Accountability across levels. SWA has also pushed to extend accountability below the national level, citing work for the High-Level Political Forum on subnational actors (provinces, municipalities, utilities) as essential to seeing where commitments are actually delivered or stalled — directly reinforcing the conference's emphasis on strengthened data and monitoring systems.
Where the 2023 conference produced pledges and a UN-wide coordination mandate, SWA has supplied much of the follow-through machinery — HoSI's political mobilization architecture and the MAM's accountability tracking — that keeps those commitments visible and measurable heading into 2026.