Women and girls use more than 8 hours a day travelling from 10 to 15 km to collect water. They transport between 20 and 15 litres of water in each trip.

In most developing countries, women are responsible for water management at the domestic and community level.

Women have often played a leadership role in promoting environmental ethics, reducing resource use and recycling resources, to minimize waste and excessive consumption. Women, especially indigenous women, have particular knowledge of ecological linkage and fragile ecosystem management. Sustainable development practices that do not involve women will not succeed in the long run.

Some 30% of women in Egypt walk over an hour a day to meet water needs.

At least 50% of the world’s food is grown by women farmers and it amounts to 80% in some African countries.
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Water has served as the subject and stimulus for many different types of art such as painting, music, and literature and, in several instances, has provided the main subject of the artist’s studies.

Water has been represented in many different ways, sometimes as a symbol or in a stylized form; at other times efforts were made to capture the realistic nature of water, as was the case during the Renaissance in late 15th-century western art.

Often, art has served water cults, contributing images that personify both the physical and metaphysical aspects of water and numerous water divinities.

Some artists were interested in water itself. One of these was Leonardo da Vinci, who was fascinated by water and studied it both as an artist/scientist and as a hydrological engineer. Others attempted to illustrate the qualities water conveyed literally, metaphorically, symbolically, or allegorically in mythology, religion, and folklore.
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A waterway is any navigable body of water, including rivers, lakes, oceans, and canals. In order for it to be navigable, it must meet several criteria:

• it has to be deep enough to allow the draft depth of the vessels using it;
• the waterway must be wide enough to allow passage for the beam width of the vessels using it;
• it has to be free of barriers to navigation such as waterfalls and rapids, or have a way around them (such as canal locks);
• the current of the waterway must be mild enough to allow vessels to make headway.

The world’s longest inland waterway open to ocean shipping is the St. Lawrence Seaway-Great Lakes Waterway in Canada, which was opened in 1959. It is 3,790 km in length, from Anticosti Island to the head of Lake Superior.

Almost 70% of United States’ agricultural exports travel the upper Mississippi River and the Illinois Waterway system.
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Under the text of the Ramsar Convention, wetlands are defined as: ‘areas of marsh, fen, peatland or water, whether natural or artificial, permanent or temporary, with water that is static or flowing, fresh, brackish or salt, including areas of marine water the depth of which at low tide does not exceed six metres’.

The Convention on Wetlands is an intergovernmental treaty adopted on 2 February 1971 in the Iranian city of Ramsar. Thus, though nowadays the name of the Convention is usually written ‘Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar, Iran, 1971)’, it has come to be known as the ‘Ramsar Convention’. The original emphasis of the Convention was on the conservation and wise use of wetlands with the primary goal of providing habitats for waterbirds. Over the years, however, the Convention has broadened its scope to cover all aspects of wetland conservation and wise use, recognizing wetlands as ecosystems that are extremely important for biodiversity conservation in general and for the well-being of human communities.
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The navigation of rivers, lakes and oceans began before recorded history. Navigation, due to its relationship and importance to transportation, has played a leading part in the advancement of civilization. Men learned early that travel by water was a convenient means of transporting their goods of trade to other lands.

The first crafts were probably kinds of canoes that were cut out from tree trunks and propelled with short oars. During the Stone Age, these embarkations were made by cutting down a tree and hollowing its trunk. Later, they were covered with impermeable fabrics before being constructed from tied or sewed wooden plates. Soon it was discovered that if sails were attached to the ships, they would harness wind-power and the ships would go faster. Early sails were probably made of interwoven rushes or leather.
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