Clean water is an essential element for human health, wellbeing and prosperity. Whether used for drinking, cleaning, food production or industrial output, access to sufficient water resources is a basic human need. Access to sufficient and safe sanitation facilities is also vital for hygiene, disease prevention, and human health.
The World Health Organization highlights the contribution of poor water and sanitation access to health, mortality and reduced poverty alleviation.1 2 Contaminated drinking water, poor sanitation facilities and open defecation contribute to the transmission of infectious diseases such as diarrhoea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and polio, and can also have severe impacts on malnutrition. The WHO estimates that in 2015, the deaths of 361,000 children under 5-years-old could have been avoided by addressing water and sanitation risk factors.3
In this entry we present data on progress on improved water access, access to sanitation facilities, and the incidence of open defecation. Freshwater — whilst a basic human need — is also a finite, and in some regions, scarce resource. This entry also presents data on levels of freshwater use, withdrawals by sector, and levels of freshwater scarcity/stress. Balancing human needs for freshwater with sustaining long-term supplies will continue to pose an important development challenge in the decades to follow.
https://ourworldindata.org/water-access-resources-sanitation
