Water is essential to human beings and all forms of life. But pollution and lack of access to clean water is proliferating the cycle of poverty, water-borne diseases, and gender inequities. At the United Nations conferences of the 1990s-beginning with the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil all the way through to the 2000 Millennium Development Summit in New York, U.S.A. and the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa-it became widely accepted that gender equality and women's empowerment are essential to poverty eradication. But despite the recognition that advancing women's human rights is key to breaking the cycle of poverty, implementation of this overarching policy agenda has been elusive. This paper presents an overview of the relationship between gender, poverty and water.