Useful Water Facts

Here are the facts about the water crisis. Every day, thousands of people die from lack of access to clean water. The safe water issue is intimately linked to hygiene education and proper sanitation, which is why we take an integrated approach to bringing safe water to the world’s poor. This page is broken into the following sections:

1. Water
2. Sanitation
3. Impacts on Children
4. Impacts on Women
5. Impacts on Productivity
6. What Can You Do?
7. Water in the News
8. Lesson Plans
9. Resource Links

Water
• 3.575 million people die each year from water-related disease. (11)
• 43% of water-related deaths are due to diarrhea. (11)
• 84% of water-related deaths are in children ages 0 – 14. (11)
• 98% of water-related deaths occur in the developing world. (11)
• 884 million people, lack access to safe water supplies, approximately one in eight people. (5)
• The water and sanitation crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns. (1)
• At any given time, half of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from a water-related disease. (1)
• Less than 1% of the world’s fresh water (or about 0.007% of all water on earth) is readily accessible for direct human use. (12)
• An American taking a five-minute shower uses more water than the typical person living in a developing country slum uses in a whole day. (1)
• About a third of people without access to an improved water source live on less than $1 a day. More than two thirds of people without an improved water source live on less than $2 a day. (1)
• Poor people living in the slums often pay 5-10 times more per liter of water than wealthy people living in the same city. (1)
• Without food a person can live for weeks, but without water you can expect to live only a few days. (4)
• The daily requirement for sanitation, bathing, and cooking needs, as well as for assuring survival, is about 13.2 gallons per person. (3)
• Over 50 percent of all water projects fail and less than five percent of projects are visited, and far less than one percent have any longer-term monitoring. (10)
Sanitation
• Only 62% of the world’s population has access to improved sanitation – defined as a sanitation facility that ensures hygienic separation of human excreta from human contact. (5)
• 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation, including 1.2 billion people who have no facilities at all. (5)
• The majority of the illness in the world is caused by fecal matter.(9)
• Lack of sanitation is the world’s biggest cause of infection. (9)
• At any one time, more than half of the poor in the developing world are ill from causes related to hygiene, sanitation and water supply. (9)
• 88% of cases of diarrhea worldwide are attributable to unsafe water, inadequate sanitation or insufficient hygiene. (9)
• Of the 60 million people added to the world’s towns and cities every year, most occupy impoverished slums and shanty-towns with no sanitation facilities. (8)
• It is estimated that improved sanitation facilities could reduce diarrhea-related deaths in young children by more than one-third. If hygiene promotion is added, such as teaching proper hand washing, deaths could be reduced by two thirds. It would also help accelerate economic and social development in countries where sanitation is a major cause of lost work and school days because of illness. (6)

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