Report: More People Worldwide Have Clean Water

Worldwide access to safe drinking water is on the rise — so much so, that the world is on track to meet and possibly even exceed the target set by the Millennium Development Goals. That means that we are on track to cut the number of people without access to good water in half or more.

The news comes from a report released this week by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), which says 87 percent of the world's population or approximately 5.9 billion people are using safe drinking water sources.

The report is used by policy-makers, donors, governmental and nongovernmental agencies to decide what needs to be done and where to focus their efforts to achieve these goals.

Unfortunately, the good news about drinking water is offset by not-so-good news about worldwide access to sanitation facilities. Thirty-nine percent of the world's population (over 2.6 billion people) are still living without improved sanitation facilities.

"With almost 884 million people living without access to safe drinking-water and approximately three times that number lacking basic sanitation we must act now as one global community to ensure water and sanitation for all," said Ms. Clarissa Brocklehurst, UNICEF Chief of the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) in a press release.

According to WHO and UNICEF, every year, 1.5 million children under age five die of diarrhea.  And, 80 percent of those deaths, or 4,000 deaths a day, are due to unsafe water and sanitation. Women and girls are more affected than are men and boys because they are the ones who tend to be the ones who collect drinking water.

Still, open defecation — the riskiest sanitation practice of all — is on the decline worldwide, with a global decrease from 25 percent in 1990 to 17 percent in 2008. That's a drop of 168 million people practicing open defecation since 1990.

Photo by mckaysavage via Flickr.