Statistics

Key statistics Sanitation Health and disease Education and economics Millennium Development Goals Financing the sector Water use Water in the world Abbreviations used

Key statistics

• 884 million people in the world do not have access to safe water. This is roughly one in eight of the world's population. (WHO/UNICEF)

• 2.5 billion people in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation, this is almost two fifths of the world's population. (WHO/UNICEF)

• 1.4 million children die every year from diarrhoea caused by unclean water and poor sanitation - 4,000 child deaths a day or one child every 20 seconds. This equates to 160 infant school classrooms lost every single day to an entirely preventable public health crisis. (WHO/WaterAid)

• WaterAid projects providing safe water, sanitation and hygiene education cost just £15 per head. (WaterAid)

• For every $1 invested in water and sanitation, $8 is returned. (UNDP)

• Hand-washing with soap at critical times can reduce the incidence of diarrhoea by up to 47%. (UN Water)

• The integrated approach of providing water, sanitation and hygiene reduces the number of deaths caused by diarrhoeal diseases by an average of 65%. (WHO)

• The weight of water that women in Africa and Asia carry on their heads is commonly 20kg, the same as the average UK airport luggage allowance. (HDR 2006)

• In the UK the expansion of water and sanitation infrastructure in the 1880s contributed to a 15 year increase in life expectancy in the following four decades. (HDR, 2006)

Sanitation

• Every year, the average person produces 35 kilos of faeces and 500 litres of urine. (UN Water)

• One gram of human faeces can contain 10,000,000 viruses, 1,000,000 bacteria, 1000 parasite cysts, 100 parasite eggs. (UNICEF)

• No sub-Saharan African country is on-track to meet the sanitation MDG. (WHO/UNICEF)

• Every year, around 60 million children in the developing world are born into households without access to sanitation. (UN Water)

• Children living in households with no toilet are twice as likely to get diarrhoea as those with a toilet. (WEDC)

• In the developing world as a whole, around 90% of sewage is discharged untreated into rivers, polluting them and affecting plant and aquatic life. (UN)
  

Health and disease

This gravity flow scheme reaches 1256 people in Tigray, Ethiopia.

Credit: WaterAid / Caroline Irby

• At any one time half the hospital beds in developing countries are filled with people suffering from diarrhoea.  (UNDP)

• Children in poor environments often carry 1,000 parasitic worms in their bodies at a time. (UNICEF)

• Intestinal worms infect about 10% of the population of the developing world. Intestinal parasitic infections can lead to malnutrition, anaemia and stunted growth. (WHO)

Education and economics

• Lack of safe water and sanitation costs sub-Saharan Africa around 5% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) each year. (UNDP)

• 443 million school days are lost each year due to water-related diseases.

• 11% more girls attend school when sanitation is available. (UK DFID)

• 40 billion working hours are spent carrying water each year in Africa. (Cosgrove and Rijsberman, 1998)

• Households in rural Africa spend an average of 26% of their time fetching water, and it is generally women who are burdened with the task. (UK DFID)

Millennium Development Goals

• 1.2 billion people gained access to sanitation between 1990 and 2004. (UN Water)

• 1.7 billion people will still need sanitation even if the 2015 MDG sanitation goal to halve the proportion of people without sanitation is reached. (WHO/UNICEF)

• Cost of meeting the sanitation MDG target every year until 2015: US$9.5 billion. If sustained the same investment could achieve basic sanitation for the entire world within 20 years. US$9.5 billion a year is 1% of annual world military spending and an estimated one-third of what the world spends on bottled water every year. (UN Water)

• Cost of meeting the water and sanitation MDG targets every year until 2015 is US$11.3 billion. (UN Water)

Financing the sector

• Over the past 10 years, aid to health and HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa has increased by nearly 500%, while aid to water and sanitation has increased by only 79%. (OECD)

• The UK Department for International Development is set to double funding for water to Africa to £95 million per year by 2008 with a further doubling to £200 million per year by 2011. (UK DFID)

Water use

• The average European uses 200 litres of water every day. North Americans use 400 litres. (HDR, 2006)

• The average person in the developing world uses 10 litres of water every day for their drinking, washing and cooking. (WSSCC)

• An old lavatory uses at least nine litres of water a flush; a low-flush model uses as little as three litres. Each household in the UK uses about 50 litres a person a day for flushing; 35% of domestic water use. (Environment Agency)

• On current trends over the next 20 years humans will use 40% more water than they do now. (UNEP)

• Agriculture accounts for over 80% of the world's water consumption. (UNEP)

• The average amount of water needed to produce one kilogramme of potatoes is 1000 litres, wheat is 1450 litres and rice is 3450 litres. (Gleick, 2001)

Water in the world

• 97.5% of the earth's water is saltwater. If the world's water fitted into a bucket, only one teaspoonful would be drinkable. (HDR, 2006)

• While the world's population tripled in the 20th century, the use of renewable water resources has grown six-fold. Within the next fifty years, the world population will increase by another 40 to 50%. (World Water Council)

Abbreviations used

• DFID – UK Department for International Development
• HDR - UN Human Development Report (2006)
• OECD – Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
• UNDP – United Nations Development Programme
• UNEP – United National Environment Programme
• UNICEF – United Nations Children’s Fund
• WEDC – Water Engineering Department, University of Loughborough
• WHO – World Health Organization
• WSSCC – Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council

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