On Thursday, April 16, a cross-sector group of practitioners, policymakers, and innovators came together for an internal webinar on an issue that affects everyone but is rarely framed as development work: laundry. Speakers explored how everyday washing practices intersect with water security, gender equality, health, climate, and urban development—and how practical improvements can deliver meaningful development gains. 

Read the brochure here.

Setting the Scene – DDG Marife Apilado (Deputy Director General, PSOD)

DDG Marife Apilado opened the session by noting that laundry is an everyday activity that rarely features in policy or infrastructure discussions—even though it has a direct influence on development outcomes. For billions of people, especially in low-income and water-stressed settings, washing clothes remains manual, time-consuming, and physically demanding. She framed the webinar’s central question: what changes when we treat laundry not as a private household matter, but as part of development systems and service delivery?

Laundry: A Hidden Development Issue – Zonibel Woods, Senior Social Development Specialist, Gender and Development, ADB

Zonibel Woods described laundry as “invisible infrastructure” at the intersection of unpaid care work, water use, energy demand, pollution, and climate risk. In Asia and the Pacific, she noted, laundry is still largely done by hand, and women and girls carry most of the time and physical burden. This contributes to gender time poverty, reducing time available for education, paid work, and rest.

She also highlighted environmental impacts, including microplastic fibers shed from synthetic clothing during washing. While machine washing is a major source of these emissions globally, Zonibel emphasized that the answer is not to place responsibility solely on households. Instead, improved product design, standards, and policy choices can reduce pollution at the source. Treating laundry as a design and planning issue—rather than a behavior-change add-on—opens up low-cost, high-impact options across housing, WASH, and urban programs.

Scaling Climate Resilient Urban Sanitation – Sandeep Sheth, Kanupriya Rawal, Suvidha Concept, Hindustan Unilever

Sandeep Sheth and Kanupriya Rawal focused on the challenges of delivering reliable water and sanitation services in rapidly growing urban informal settlements, where operational failures and gendered burdens often undermine infrastructure investments. Drawing on the Suvidha concept, they highlighted how an integrated model combining sanitation, water, and laundry services can generate measurable health, economic, gender, and climate benefits.

Their presentation clearly demonstrated strong evidence of scalability and impact, and stood out for its rigorous connection between social outcomes, operational practicality, and system‑level sustainability.

The Washing Machine Project: Technology, Dignity, and Livelihoods – Atti Muriricho, Senior Program Officer, The Washing Machine Project

Atti Muririchio focused on low-resource and humanitarian contexts, where laundry often involves heavy physical labor, health risks, and limited access to water. Drawing on field experience, she noted that women may spend up to 20 hours each week washing clothes by hand.

She introduced the Divya manual washing machine, a non-electric device that can reduce water use by about 50% and cut washing time by up to 75%. She shared examples from health facilities and displacement settings, where the machines can strengthen hygiene and day-to-day resilience. She also emphasized service and livelihood models—such as women-run laundrettes paired with training—that can turn laundry from a burden into an income-generating opportunity.

What is the Laundry Transformation Initiative? – Tanya Huizer, Senior Water Resilience Specialist, Water and Urban Development, ADB

Closing the webinar, Tanya Huizer outlined the rationale for the Laundry Transformation Initiative. She noted that laundry is often overlooked, not because solutions are unavailable, but because it cuts across multiple sectors—water, energy, housing, gender, and urban development—without a clear “owner.” Yet it shapes many priority outcomes, from women’s time and dignity to water efficiency, health, and climate resilience.

She introduced the “Laundry Ladder,” a framework that maps step-by-step improvements—from unsafe, labor-intensive handwashing to shared services or efficient mechanical systems. She emphasized that even small upgrades can deliver meaningful benefits, and outlined three areas for action:

1. Integrating laundry into sovereign operations and policy dialogue;
2. Supporting private-sector and service-based solutions; and
3. Convening coalitions across governments, multilateral development banks, corporates, and innovators.

She closed by inviting colleagues to contribute to ongoing evidence-building, pilots, and operational entry points. She noted that once the laundry burden is made visible, its relevance across development contexts becomes clear—and difficult to ignore.

SPEAKERS

• Zonibel Woods is a gender and development specialist with over 30 years of experience in advancing gender equality through gender mainstreaming, policy development, and capacity building.
• Atti Muriricho is a Program Officer at The Washing Machine Project, managing global programme delivery and partnerships to support low‑income communities in humanitarian and development contexts.
• Sandeep Sheth is a Sustainability Project Manager at Hindustan Unilever, leading urban WASH initiatives and advancing the Suvidha community sanitation and hygiene model.
• Kanupriya Rawal is a social impact strategist at Hindustan Unilever, leading high‑impact sustainability programmes and shaping large‑scale public initiatives in sanitation and social development across India.
• Tanya Huizer is a water and urban resilience specialist at ADB, contributing to water projects and coordinating initiatives, including the Water Resilience Trust Fund, the Water and Youth Action Agenda, the Laundry Transformation, and WOP4R.