The invisible backbone of Dakar’s economy
When Africa celebrates its women on July 31st, Senegal faces a paradox. While the African Union dedicates 2026 to water accessibility and sanitation, the country’s economy — and particularly its capital Dakar — relies heavily on a workforce that remains largely uncounted and unrecognized: migrant women.
These women, whether internal migrants from rural areas or African women arriving from neighboring countries, form the invisible foundation of Dakar’s daily life. They clean homes, care for children, sell goods in markets, and prepare meals in most urban households. Yet their contributions go unnoticed in public policies and social debates, despite the fact that their work — and dignity — depend entirely on access to safe water and sanitation, a challenge the AU’s 2026 agenda aims to address.
From rural water queues to urban invisibility
In many rural areas of Senegal, women and girls spend hours daily fetching water, a burden that directly impacts their education, health, and economic opportunities. This harsh reality pushes many young women toward cities like Dakar, where they join the informal sector — a massive economic engine employing nearly half of Senegal’s workforce. According to national statistics, women make up 51.3% of the informal labor force nationwide, but only 41.5% in Dakar, where they occupy the most precarious positions: domestic workers without contracts, social protection, or legal recourse.
This internal migration serves as a first step toward longer journeys, but it remains largely ignored by policymakers and society alike. Their labor is essential, yet their access to basic services like water and sanitation often depends on the goodwill of employers — a fragile arrangement that leaves them vulnerable to exploitation and health risks.
Senegal as a haven for African migrants — until recently
Senegal has long been a destination for migrants from across West Africa. The fifth national census (2023) recorded 207,791 foreign residents, representing 1.1% of the population, with women accounting for 44.3% of this group. Guineans (40.3%), Malians (14.9%), Bissau-Guineans (4.4%), Gambians (3%), and Mauritanians (2.1%) form the largest communities, particularly in border regions like Kédougou, where foreign-born residents outnumber those born elsewhere in Senegal who have returned to settle.
This tradition of hospitality is now under threat. Over recent months, a xenophobic discourse has gained ground, targeting specific African communities — particularly Guineans of Fulani ethnicity — accused of straining public schools and disrupting the country’s demographic balance. Some political voices have even called for stricter residency conditions and the removal of birthright citizenship for children born in Senegal to foreign parents, echoing the cyclical xenophobic violence seen in South Africa, where Senegalese communities in Durban have faced similar stigmatization.
Foreign women in Senegal: facing double vulnerability
In this climate, migrant women from other African countries face compounded risks. Many work in domestic service or informal trade, without contracts or social protection, and depend on employers or local networks for their legal status — and crucially, for access to water and sanitation. When collective suspicion targets entire nationalities or ethnic groups, these women become primary targets for harassment, exploitation, and violence, often too afraid to report abuses for fear of worsening their precarious situation or drawing attention to their communities.
Xenophobia is never gender-neutral. For foreign women in Senegal, it compounds existing vulnerabilities: informal employment, lack of legal protection, and dependence on third parties for access to essential services. Without recognized rights, their ability to work safely and live with dignity remains precarious.
ECOWAS-AES rupture: new risks for Malian, Burkinabe, and Nigerien women workers
The breakdown of relations between ECOWAS and the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) in early 2025 has introduced new legal uncertainties. While the free movement protocol of 1979 previously guaranteed residency rights for citizens of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, these protections now rest on political declarations rather than institutional mechanisms. For domestic workers from these countries — many of whom lack proper documentation — their right to stay in Senegal depends on fragile bilateral arrangements rather than secure legal status.
The Sahel’s volatile security situation, marked by deadly attacks in Mali in early 2026, could further increase the flow of Malian women migrating to Senegal. This context demands heightened vigilance from civil society and unions to ensure these women — already in precarious situations — are not denied access to essential services such as foreign ID cards, healthcare, and education for their children. Their legal footing has shifted from a stable multilateral framework to a more fragile bilateral arrangement, leaving them exposed.
Colonial borders and the roots of modern xenophobia
To understand this moment, we must look beyond imported narratives and examine xenophobia from within. Today’s African borders, largely drawn at the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, ignore pre-existing kinship, trade, and cultural networks, as scholar Achille Mbembe has noted. Postcolonial states, often fragile and seeking legitimacy, have turned to “autochthony” policies: defining who truly “belongs” to the nation at the expense of those labeled foreigners, even after generations of residence. This logic fueled South Africa’s Afrophobia and now resurfaces in Dakar.
An anti-racist reading must acknowledge this as intra-African xenophobia — a hierarchization of belonging among Black populations that perpetuates colonial divisions, as Frantz Fanon warned in The Wretched of the Earth about the risks of unfulfilled independence promises.
We must also apply a decolonial gender lens. Feminist scholars like Oyèronké Oyèwùmí and Amina Mama have shown how colonialism reshaped gender categories, which postcolonial nationalists later repurposed to define national belonging. Foreign women, their fertility, and their children born in Senegal become key sites for controlling the boundaries of national identity. Challenges to birthright citizenship disproportionately target these women and their children, reinforcing the idea that their presence — and labor — is conditional, not inherent.
Water and sanitation: an invisible barrier for migrant women
The AU’s 2026 theme is not just a technical slogan — it cuts directly to the lived realities of migrant women. In Dakar’s peripheral neighborhoods, where many internal and foreign migrants settle, access to running water and safe sanitation remains partial. The absence of decent toilets exposes women and girls to nighttime insecurity, while domestic workers living with employers have no legal recourse to demand access to water and sanitation — a dependency they share with Senegalese women employed as domestic workers abroad and African women employed as domestic workers in Senegal.
A water policy that ignores the neighborhoods where migrants live or ties access to essential services to administrative status will miss its mark. The AU’s goals can only be achieved if they address the specific needs of these women — those who leave, those who return, and those arriving from other African countries.
A hospitality worth its name — and water worth sharing
The African Women’s Day should not be reduced to empty tributes, nor should the 2026 agenda remain a summit slogan. Together, they must spark a simple yet dual political conclusion: without migrant women — whether Senegalese moving within their own country or Africans settling in Senegal — entire segments of the subregion’s economies would grind to a halt. Without guaranteed access to safe water and dignified sanitation for these same women, in their homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods, the AU’s 2063 Agenda goals will remain out of reach for those who need them most.
A hospitality that stops at national borders, or a water policy that overlooks these women, misses the same opportunity. The time has come to recognize their labor, protect their rights, and ensure their dignity — not as charity, but as a fundamental step toward justice.
