The world is still on track for reaching the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) drinking water target, but the trend
appears to be deteriorating. On current trends, the world will miss the sanitation
target by more than half a billion people.
- Every year, unsafe water, coupled with a lack of basic sanitation,kills at least 1.6 million children under the age of five years
- More than eight times the number of people who died in the Asian tsunami of 2004. At the beginning of the Water for Life decade, 1.1 billion people did not have access to an improved source of drinking water.
- 84% of the population without access to an improved source of drinking water live in rural areas.
- 2.6 billion people, more than 40% of the world population,do not use a toilet, but defecate in the open or in unsanitary places. In 2004, more than three out of every five rural people, over 2 billion, did not have access to a basic sanitation facility. If the current trend persists, nearly 1.7 billion rural dwellers will still not have access to improved sanitation by 2015. In 2004, urban sanitation coverage was more than double the rural sanitation coverage.
- 73% of rural dwellers have access to an improved source of drinking water, only 30% have access to piped water in the home. Keeping up with the population increase is a major challenge for urban areas; maintaining current coverage levels till 2015 requires serving 700 million urban dwellers over the coming decade. Migration from rural to urban areas poses a major challenge for city planners; extending basic drinking water and sanitation services to pre-urban and slum areas to reach the poorest people is of the utmost importance to prevent outbreaks of cholera and other water-related diseases in these often overcrowded places.
- Urban drinking water coverage has remained at 95% since 1990. Urban sanitation coverage has increased by only one percentage point, from 79% to 80%.
- About 770 million and 700 million urban people gained access to improved drinking water and sanitation, respectively, during 1990–2004.
