Water and Sanitation Facts
Key Facts and Statistics about Water
More than 300 million people in Africa do not have access to clean water.
Access to adequate sanitation (toilets and hand-washing facilities) in sub-Saharan Africa is only 36%.
In sub-Saharan Africa, 42% of the population is still without improved water supply. So nearly half of the whole population does not have access to an improved water supply.
The World Health Organization estimates that 80 per cent of all sickness in the world is due to unsafe water and poor hygiene and that 4000 children die everyday due to drinking unsafe water. Can you imagine 4000 children in all of the schools in London dying everyday?
About 2.1 million people die every year from diarrhoeal diseases (including cholera); 90% are children under 5 years old. So very young children are at severe risk.
Approximately 88% of diarrhoeal disease is attributed to unsafe water supply, inadequate sanitation and hygiene: improved sanitation (toilets) reduces diarrhoea morbidity (deaths) by 32% and hygiene interventions, including the promotion of hand washing, can lead to a reduction of diarrhoeal cases by up to 45%.
In most developing countries the task of collecting water falls to women and children. In rural Africa women often walk ten miles or more every day to fetch water. In the dry season it is not uncommon for women to walk twice this distance. The tragedy is that, having spent so much time and effort in reaching a source of water, the water itself is often dirty, polluted and a health hazard.
Unclean water causes illnesses such as diarrhoea and dysentery, which are responsible worldwide for the deaths of thousands of children under the age of five every day.
The wells at the end of these journeys are often little more than waterholes dug out deeper and deeper as the dry season progresses. They can be very difficult to reach, with steep sides, which sometimes can collapse, killing women and children.
The paths to these wells are narrow and slippery and many accidents occur. Imagine the frustration of walking three miles towards home with a heavy water pot and then slipping and falling - losing all the water you so carefully collected, and probably breaking the pot too.
As well as travelling such long distances, women often have to wait in turn to collect water.
Waiting times can add five hours onto the journey. Some traditional sources almost dry out for several months each year and it can take up to an hour for one woman to fill her bucket as she waits for the water to slowly filter through the ground. To avoid such long waits many women get up in the middle of the night to get to the water source when there is no queue.
In urban slums without access to clean water women have to either walk long distances, use dirty water from ponds and rivers (often polluted by factories) or they are charged large amounts of money by water sellers.
Women in towns need to find paid employment to keep their families and so the need to collect water becomes a drain on both their time and money.
Children are unable to go to school as they often help their mothers collect water or work at home while their mothers travel to collect water.
The rest of the developing world
1.1 billion people lacked access to improved water sources (tap water in the house or yard from public distribution systems, protected wells and springs, public stand posts, rain water collection), which represented 17% of the global population.
2.6 billion (42% of the world population) lacked access to basic sanitation.
Despite major progress in South Asia, little more than a third of its population use improved sanitation;
Global population growth is cancelling many of the gains already made. Though more than a billion people gained improved sanitation between 1990 and 2002, the population without coverage declined by only 100 million.
1.3 million people die of malaria each year, 90% are children under 5; better management of water resources reduces transmission of malaria and other vector-borne diseases.
In Bangladesh, between 28 and 35 million people consume drinking-water with elevated levels of arsenic. Arseninc reduction is aided by identifying alternative low arsenic water sources or by using arsenic removal systems.
Unreliable drinking-water supply systems have encouraged the habit of domestic water storage, often creating conditions favourable for breeding of Aedes mosquitoes, the vectors of dengue fever. As a result, dengue outbreaks have rapidly expanded across the globe, and they have spread from the traditional urban environment to rural settlements.
Between 2002 and 2015, the world’s population is expected to increase every year by 74.8 million people.
Millennium Development Goals
In 2000 world governments signed up to the Millennium Development goals (MDGs) to halve world poverty by 2015, including targets to halve the proportion of people without safe water and adequate sanitation.
Over 2.6 billion people – two fifths of the world’s population – do not have access to sanitation. To reach the sanitation MDG, nearly 400,000 people (the population of Manchester) need to gain access to sanitation every single day – a 90% increase on performance since 1990.
1.1 billion people – one person out of every six in the world – do not have access to safe water. To reach the MDG on water, nearly 300,000 people (the population of Newcastle) need to gain access to safe water every single day.
2.1 million children die every year from diarrhoea: one child every 15 seconds.
Annual spending on water and sanitation needs to double, from around $14billion to $30billion – a gap of $16bn which is the equivalent to 15% of Europe’s annual alcohol bill.
Between 2000 and 2004 the percentage of international aid dedicated to water and sanitation fell from 6% to 5%. Among G8 countries the drop was from 7% to 4%. UK bilateral aid fell from 3.8% to 0.86%.
Funds made available by central government to the local authorities with the responsibility to provide water and sanitation services are usually worth less than $1 per person per year.
