A right I think every person should have is access to clean, safe drinking water close to home. I'm a forty-four-year-old water engineer working for a local council in Kaduna, Nigeria, so this is something I think about every single day.
At the moment, many people don't have it. In some villages outside the city, women and children still walk long distances every morning to collect water from streams or old wells. Even in parts of the city, taps run dry for days, and families have to buy water from vendors, which is expensive and not always clean.
I think it could be protected in a few ways. Governments need to treat water like electricity or roads, as basic infrastructure that's properly funded and maintained, not just repaired after a crisis. Communities could manage small boreholes themselves, with training and a small fund for repairs, because many projects fail when one pump breaks and nobody knows how to fix it. And laws should make sure water companies can't cut off poor households completely.
The reason it's so important is that everything else depends on it. Without clean water, children get sick and miss school, and girls in particular lose hours every day carrying heavy containers, which means less time for studying. Adults can't work if they're constantly ill. I once visited a village where we'd installed a new borehole, and the head teacher told me attendance had gone up within a few months. That's when I really understood it. You can talk about education, health and equality, but none of them are possible if people don't have water.