Access to water – a global perspective

Water is the world’s most important resource.
Beyond its basic functions of sustaining life, it is also a precious commodity that billions of people around the world struggle to access.

The infographic below is from Raconteur and puts the global problem of access to water into a stunning perspective.
It’s a double problem: access to safe drinking water is difficult, while basic access to sanitation is even more difficult than we think.

It’s easy to take water for granted when everything in developed economies flows from the tap, but the harsh reality is that 2.1 billion people worldwide do not have access to safe water.
Many people around the world spend hours waiting in long queues, often several times a day, for water shared by the community, or have to travel to remote sources just to collect it.

The world’s regions are divided into five classes of access to drinking water.

The invention of the toilet in 1875 is credited with saving a billion lives to date.
Yet poor water hygiene and related diseases claim the lives of roughly one million people every year.
That’s because roughly 4.5 billion people still lack access to toilets, and the problem is particularly severe on the African continent.
In Eritrea (76%), Niger (71%), Chad (68%) and South Sudan (61%), for example, more than half of the population does not even have access to basic sanitation.

Fortunately, progress has already been made at global level.
Between 2001 and 2015, safe drinking water supply improved by 9%, while safe sanitation increased by 10%.

Source: visual capitalist