Clean water access statistics

Key figures

People without safe water

• In 2024, 1 in 4 people worldwide, 2.1 billion, still lacked safely managed drinking water.
• 696 million people still lacked even a basic water service in 2024: 287 million used limited services, 302 million used unimproved sources and 106 million used surface water.
• Safely managed drinking water coverage rose from 68 percent in 2015 to 74 percent in 2024, from 50 to 60 percent in rural areas and stayed level at 83 percent in urban areas.
• At current rates of progress the world will reach only 77 percent coverage by 2030, leaving around 2 billion people without safely managed services.
• Achieving universal coverage by 2030 would take an eightfold increase in the current global rate of progress.
• 3.4 billion people still lack safely managed sanitation, including 354 million who practice open defecation.
• More than 2.2 million Americans still do not have running water or basic plumbing like a flush toilet, and 44 million more do not have clean water that is safe to drink.

Schools and health care

• 447 million children lacked a basic drinking water service at their school in 2023, including 293 million whose school had no water service at all.
• 15 percent of schools worldwide had no drinking water service in 2023.
• In 2023, an estimated 1.1 billion people were served by health care facilities lacking basic water services.

Time spent fetching water

• In 53 countries with data, women and girls spend 250 million hours a day collecting water, over three times more than men and boys.
• In sub-Saharan Africa, one round trip to collect water takes around 33 minutes in rural areas and 25 minutes in urban areas.
• 1.8 billion people collect drinking water from supplies located off their premises, and in seven out of ten of those households women and girls are mainly responsible for collecting it.
• An estimated 40 billion hours a year are spent collecting water in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Disease and deaths

• Inadequate drinking water, sanitation and hygiene could have prevented at least 1.4 million deaths and 74 million disability-adjusted life years in 2019.
• In 2019, 69 percent of all diarrhea deaths were attributed to unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene, and more than 1 million people died from it.
• Each year diarrhea kills around 443,832 children under 5 and another 50,851 children aged 5 to 9.
• Contaminated drinking water is estimated to cause approximately 505,000 diarrheal deaths each year.
• For every dollar invested in water and sanitation there is a $4.3 return in reduced health care costs.

Funding and progress

• An estimated $150 billion is needed each year to deliver universal safe water and sanitation.
• Fewer than 30 percent of countries estimated that they have enough funding from all sources to reach their national targets.
• Donor commitments for water supply and sanitation dropped from US$ 9.4 billion in 2022 to US$ 8.5 billion in 2023, a decrease of 9 percent.
• As of 2022, 953 million children were exposed to high or extremely high water stress and 739 million to high or extremely high water scarcity.
• Today 1.42 billion people, including 450 million children, live in areas of high or extremely high water vulnerability.
• By 2030, an estimated 700 million people worldwide could be displaced by intense water scarcity.