Despite notable global progress over the past decade, the world is falling significantly short of the United Nations’ 2030 target for universal access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), according to a WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme report. As of 2024, approximately 2.1 billion people lack safely managed drinking water, 3.4 billion lack safely managed sanitation, and 1.7 billion lack basic hygiene facilities.
Environment Pulse Desk: The world has made real progress on water, sanitation and hygiene over the past decade — but nowhere near enough to hit the United Nations’ 2030 target of universal access, according to fresh figures from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme.
As of 2024, roughly 2.1 billion people still don’t have safely managed drinking water. Most of them — about 1.4 billion — get by on “basic” water services that fall short of the safely managed standard, while millions more rely on limited or unimproved sources. At the extreme end, 106 million people are still drinking untreated water straight from rivers, lakes or ponds.
Sanitation tells an even starker story: 3.4 billion people lack safely managed sanitation, including 354 million who still practice open defecation. And at home, 1.7 billion people don’t have basic hygiene facilities — 611 million of them have nowhere to wash their hands at all.
It’s not all bad news. Since 2015, nearly a billion people have gained access to safely managed drinking water, pushing global coverage from 68% to 74%. Rural areas made especially strong gains, climbing from 50% to 60% coverage, even as cities held roughly steady around 83%.
Sanitation improved too: 1.2 billion more people got safely managed services, lifting global coverage from 48% to 58%. Open defecation has dropped by 429 million people and is now nearly gone from urban areas. Hygiene access grew fastest of all, with coverage jumping from 66% to 80% as 1.6 billion people gained basic facilities. Zoom out to the year 2000, and more than two billion people have gained safe drinking water, with almost three billion gaining safe sanitation.
The trouble is pace. To reach universal coverage by 2030, the world would need to move roughly eight times faster on drinking water, six times faster on sanitation, and twice as fast on hygiene. Barring a dramatic acceleration, the UN projects that in 2030 there will still be about two billion people without safe water, three billion without safe toilets, and 1.4 billion without basic hygiene access.
The burden isn’t shared evenly. People in the least-developed countries are more than twice as likely to lack basic water and sanitation as those elsewhere, and three times as likely to lack basic hygiene. Fragile and conflict-affected states lag other regions by 38 percentage points on safe water. Rural communities, children, ethnic minorities and indigenous groups all face steeper barriers — and in schools worldwide, hundreds of millions of children still study without adequate water, toilets or handwashing facilities.
The human toll is severe. Unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene were tied to at least 1.4 million preventable deaths in 2019 — with roughly a thousand children under five dying every day from related causes. Cholera hasn’t gone away either: 2024 brought more than 560,000 reported cases and around 6,000 deaths across 60 countries.
A companion report, UN-Water’s GLAAS 2025 — based on data from 105 countries representing 62% of the world’s population — points to why progress keeps stalling. Most countries now have the right policies on paper, but implementation is where things break down: too few skilled workers, weak coordination between agencies, and chronic underfunding. Among the countries with data, the average financing gap between what’s needed and what’s available runs at 46%. Climate risk is increasingly acknowledged in national plans, but most water and sanitation systems still aren’t built to withstand the extreme weather and variability climate change is bringing.
With under five years left before the 2030 deadline, the picture is one of genuine but insufficient progress. Officials say closing the gap will take stronger national systems — clearer institutions, better monitoring, more skilled staff and far more sustainable financing. Without a serious jump in investment and political will, billions of people will still be waiting for something as basic as clean water and a safe place to go to the bathroom.
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