Since 2015, global statistics have sought to count the number of people whose human right to access safe drinking water is not being met. A new statistical indicator, access to safely managed water services (so-called SMWS access), includes parameters that reflect criteria of this human right, in particular the potability or contamination of water. Global statistics on access to drinking water finally measure access to truly safe water! After a few years of start-up, the WHO-UNICEF team that manages this indicator is now able to publish statistics every 2 years with sufficient country values to estimate a statistically meaningful global value.
The latest update is very recent. The report “Progress on household water, sanitation and hygiene, 2000-2022: Special focus on gender[i]” dates from July 2023. It provides and analyse national and global values at the end of 2022. The main findings of this report were presented by Camille Chambon in September 2023 in Défis Humanitaires[ii] n°80.
However, the statistical data updated to 2022 has also been published on the www.washdata.org website, which provides much more information. This effort at transparency is to be commended, as it makes it easier to understand how the various estimates are built. More, these data enable analyses that go further than what the WHO and UNICEF have published in their reports. That is the subject of this article: what do these new statistics tell us that goes beyond what has been published?
A WHO-UNICEF 2023 report that continues to focus on coverage rates
In March 2023, I wrote an article[iii] in Défis Humanitaires describing the United Nations’ persistent habit of reporting global statistics on access to safe drinking water while giving much space to details and analyses of progress in “coverage rates” and little space to “numbers of people without satisfactory access”. This rather technocratic attitude does not really respect the political objective of universal access and in some cases can lead to the concealment of regressions in relation to this objective. This habit is inconsistent with the global statistics on hunger, which are usually expressed in terms of the number of people suffering from hunger. No one is interested in the number or proportion of people who eat their fill!
The WHO-UNICEF 2023i report is no exception. For the SDG indicator, its summary page on access to safe drinking water provides 30 coverage rates and only one number of people without access! The latter, the 2.2 billion people without satisfactory access in 2022, has been widely publicised, but with no details and no information on its evolution over time, unlike the coverage rates. Furthermore, while the chapter on safe drinking water provides trends in rural and urban populations with access to safe drinking water, it gives neither the numbers nor the trends in rural and urban populations without satisfactory access.
However, this report makes significant progress in counting the number of people in different parts of the world without basic access to water. Let us hope that the next edition does the same for access to truly safe drinking water, a need that is three times greater.
With regard to the evolution of needs since 2015, the UN has published additional information in its 2023 annual report on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Methodological notes
Before going any further into the analysis of the 2022 statistics, I would like to draw readers’ attention to several points of statistical method.
Firstly, the 2000, 2015 or 2021 values published in 2023 should not be compared with the values published in 2021. This is because the 2023 statistical base uses recent data to recalculate all previous values. Changes over time can therefore only be analysed by using data from the 2023 database.
Secondly, the excellent statistical work of the WHO-UNICEF team is constrained by the fact that not all countries are able to provide national estimates. The global and regional estimates therefore contain extrapolations which are made rigorously but which create uncertainties.
The fact that the same limitations exist whatever the year means that more credibility can be given to variations over time than to the absolute values of the estimates. For example, the number of people in the world without access to safe drinking water is between 2 and 2.2 billion, after being estimated at 2.1 billion 3 years ago. The figures are not yet very accurate, as India and China are having difficulties in numbering people. But the 6% drop between 2015 and 2022 calculated under the same conditions is probably meaningful.
Progress on access to safe drinking water is slow
For several years now, the UN has been warning of the slow progress being made. The WHO-UNICEF 2023 report states that the pace of progress needs to be increased by a factor of 6 to achieve the target of universal access by 2030. Figure 1 below shows changes between 2015 and 2022 in the number of people without access to various essential services:
- access to safe drinking water as defined by the SDGs, i.e. access to “safely-managed water services”;
- “basic” access to drinking water, which does not guarantee the potability of water or the regularity of the water availability, but is nevertheless used for the SDG 1.4 target of access to essential services for poor or vulnerable people. It refers to access to “improved” sources requiring less than 30 minutes to obtain water;
- access to basic sanitation, i.e. decent, healthy toilets that are not shared with neighbours. This indicator is close to that of the Millennium Development Goals (2000-2015), with the addition of the criterion of not sharing toilets. The SDG indicator for SDG target 6.2 is much more ambitious than basic sanitation as it also includes the need to clean up waste. As this indicator is therefore much more a measure of domestic effluent treatment rates than of people’s access to sanitation, it is not examined here;
- access to electricity, an indicator of target SDG 7.1.
For each of these services, the rural component is drawn in light colour, while the urban component is drawn in dark colour.
This graph highlights several realities that are useful for assessing public policies:
- Average progress in access to safe drinking water is very slow: needs have only fallen by 6% in 7 years, while at the same time needs for basic access to water have fallen by 19%, those for access to basic sanitation by 24% and those for access to electricity by more than 30%! In other words, policies on access to safe drinking water are far less effective than policies on access to sanitation and access to electricity. The populations lacking these services are ranked in the same order. 2.2 billion need safe drinking water, 1.5 billion need sanitation and only 0.7 billion need electricity. This suggests that, on average, governments give priority to electricity in their national priorities and devote far fewer financial resources to water than to electricity.
- The light-coloured areas represent rural populations. Whether it is safe drinking water, sanitation, water or electricity, the number of rural dwellers lacking these services is decreasing faster than for the population as a whole.
- The dark-coloured areas show the urban populations. We can see that access to essential services is progressing much more slowly in urban areas than in rural areas for electricity (-27% in 6 years) and access to basic sanitation (-14% in 7 years).
For drinking water, the situation is catastrophic: the number of urban dwellers without basic access to water is stagnating, while the number of urban dwellers without safe drinking water (access to truly safe drinking water) has risen by 9% in 7 years! - As long as the number of urban dwellers without safe drinking water increases, it is mathematically impossible to achieve universal access to safe drinking water. The curve of safe drinking water needs in cities is almost a straight line. There has been no acceleration for years, despite warnings from UN-Water. The reality of the results of public policies diverges from the clear political objective of universal access to safe drinking water.
Where are the 2.2 billion people without safe drinking water?
The WHO-UNICEF database provides coverage rates for safe drinking water services for most of the world’s major regions. Using these rates, it is easy to calculate the number of people in these regions who do not have access to safe drinking water. Figure 2 below shows these different populations with areas that are roughly in proportion. The figures for South Asia and East Asia are not very precise, as they have been calculated by extrapolation in the absence of estimates for India and China. For a mathematical reason not yet identified, the total number of people lacking safe drinking water in each region exceeds the figure of 2.2 billion calculated for the world as a whole. The values presented below are therefore not very precise, but their orders of magnitude and variations over time give food for thought.
Figure 2 shows that there is a huge problem in sub-Saharan Africa, where 69% of the population does not have access to safe drinking water as defined by the global target.
Figure 3 below shows trends from 2015 to 2022 in the percentage of the population without access to safe drinking water in 2015. While the Asian regions appear to have made progress since 2015, with the number of people without access decreasing, the other major regions of the world are regressing, with an increase in needs. The greatest deterioration in speed and numbers is in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population without satisfactory access has increased by 90 million, or 13%, in 7 years.
Average progress masks worrying regressions
While the global estimate of the total number of people without access to safe drinking water decreases slightly between 2015 and 2022, this apparent progress conceals degradations in two major populations: sub-Saharan Africa and the urban half of the world’s population. In both cases, monitoring in terms of coverage rates suggests progress, from 27% to 31% for Africa, and from 80% to 81% for the urban population. But this modest progress in coverage rates is not enough to compensate for demographic growth on the African continent and urban growth in a very large number of countries. Figure 4 shows the number of people lacking access to safe drinking water in these two populations, and how this number has changed between 2015 and 2022. Here again, the numbers are not very precise because of the extrapolations used, but the variations over time are credible because they compare values calculated in 2015 and 2022 by using the same procedures.
These graphs show that although current efforts are leading to undeniable progress in coverage rates, this progress is insufficient in relation to population growth. As long as the number of people without safe drinking water is not reduced both in Africa and in cities, the target of universal access will be completely out of reach.
The International Water Association’s reference manual for the operational implementation of the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation
Factoring this statistical information into public policies
At the historic United Nations Water Conference in New York in March 2023, a global water crisis was acknowledged. UN-Water’s calls for accelerated action on water were reiterated, but no decisions for action were taken. In fact, since the adoption of the SDGs, there has been no discernible acceleration in global statistics on access to safe drinking water. It seems that most national policies are not seeking to achieve the target of universal access and are continuing on their previous path as if the SDG objectives did not exist.
At the SDG Summit in September 2023, the UN member states adopted a political resolution reaffirming their commitment to achieving universal access to energy, but failing to reiterate their targets for universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation, despite the much greater needs and their human rights status. Yet this declaration had been the subject of previous reports by the UN system, which mentioned the growing number of urban dwellers without access to safe drinking water. It was even in the title of the water paragraph of the UN 2023 report on the SDGs. But which government has seen this information that is never discussed or reported in the media? Does the mention of electricity and the omission of drinking water reflect differences in the influence of lobbies or differences in communication and visibility of needs? It should be noted that these reports also state that sub-Saharan Africa is “furthest behind”, but without mentioning any deterioration in access in these region.
One of the great merits of the 2030 Agenda and its SDGs is that they have made it possible to compile global statistics on major issues. Despite their imperfections, the resulting estimates are increasingly reliable. As far as access to safe drinking water is concerned, we now have much more relevant information than we had before 2015.
In particular, as shown above, those who take the time to analyse this new knowledge know that :
– Progress on access to safe drinking water is very slow on average, much slower than for electricity or basic sanitation.
– Universal access to safe drinking water is totally out of reach until the deterioration in access is halted in certain populations, particularly in cities and sub-Saharan Africa where almost two-thirds of the world population live.
But this new knowledge is not being studied, publicised or even discussed. There is an urgent need for the international community to consider it and trigger the necessary political upsurge that will lead to changes in public policies on drinking water and give water greater priority in government political programmes.
[i] https://washdata.org/report/jmp-2023-wash-households
[ii] UN drinking water: some progress, a lot of catching up to do! Summary of the UNICEF-WHO JMP Report (2020-2022), Camille Chambon, Defis Humanitaires n°80.
UN drinking water: some progress, a lot of catching up to do!
[iii] Access to drinking water : the major change in the global objective in 2015 comes up against stubborn technocratic habits, Gerard Payen, Defis Humanitaires, March 2023 https://defishumanitaires.com/en/2023/02/21/un-water-conference/
Gérard Payen
Gérard Payen has been working for over 35 years to solve water-related problems in all countries. As Water Adviser to the Secretary General of the United Nations (member of UNSGAB) from 2004 to 2015, he contributed to the recognition of the Human Rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, as well as to the adoption of the numerous water-related targets of the global Sustainable Development Goals. Today, he continues to work to mobilise the international community for better management of water-related problems, which requires more ambitious public policies. Vice-president of the French Water Partnership, he also advises the United Nations agencies that produce global water statistics. Impressed by the number of misconceptions about the nature of water-related problems, ideas that hamper public authorities in their decision-making, he published a book in 2013 to dismantle these preconceptions.