A new report launched by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF during World Water Week 2025 has revealed that billions of people around the world remain without access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services, exposing vulnerable communities to disease, poverty, and deepening inequalities.
The report on Progress on Household Drinking Water and Sanitation 2000-2024: Special Focus on Inequalities, highlights that while progress has been made over the past decade, major disparities persist, particularly among people living in low-income countries, fragile contexts, rural communities, children, and minority ethnic and indigenous groups.
According to the findings, 1 in 4 people globally , 2.1 billion , still lack access to safely managed drinking water, including 106 million who rely on untreated surface water. At the same time, 3.4 billion people remain without safely managed sanitation, of whom 354 million still practice open defecation.
The report also shows that 1.7 billion people lack basic hygiene services at home, with 611 million having no facilities at all. People in least developed countries are more than twice as likely as those in other nations to lack drinking water and sanitation, and three times as likely to lack basic hygiene. In fragile contexts, access to safely managed drinking water is 38 percentage points lower than in more stable settings.
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Although rural areas have shown improvements with drinking water access rising from 50% to 60% and hygiene coverage from 52% to 71% between 2015 and 2024 — they continue to trail behind urban areas, where progress has stagnated.
The report further reveals the disproportionate burden on women and girls. In many countries, they are primarily responsible for water collection, with families in sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Southern Asia spending more than 30 minutes a day fetching water. Adolescent girls, meanwhile, are less likely than adult women to participate in school, work, or social activities during menstruation due to inadequate access to menstrual materials.
With just five years left before the 2030 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals, the findings stress that ending open defecation and ensuring universal access to basic water, sanitation, and hygiene services will require urgent acceleration. Achieving universal coverage of safely managed services, however, appears increasingly out of reach.
“Water, sanitation and hygiene are not privileges, they are basic human rights,” said Dr Ruediger Krech, Director a.i, Environment, Climate Change and Health at WHO. “We must accelerate action, especially for the most marginalised communities, if we are to keep our promise to reach the Sustainable Development Goals.”
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UNICEF Director of WASH, Cecilia Scharp, added: “When children lack access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene, their health, education, and futures are put at risk. At the current pace, the promise of safe water and sanitation for every child is slipping further from reach.”