The WHO/UNICEF ladder has two rungs that get quoted as one. “At least basic” is a clean source within a half-hour walk. “Safely managed” is that source on the premises, working when you turn it on, and free of contamination — and it is the SDG 6.1.1 indicator. For 62 countries and 2.21 billion people, the second number does not exist.
62 of the 209 countries that publish a basic drinking water figure publish no safely-managed figure at all — 2.21 billion people, 27.31% of the population those estimates cover. Safely managed is the SDG 6.1.1 indicator, so for a quarter of the world the goal is being measured with a number nobody has.
Every country in this dataset is measured against SDG target 6.1, and the indicator for it is the safely-managed share. For 62 of them that share has never been estimated. They are not zeroes and they are not low numbers — the column is blank.
Of 209 countries with a basic figure. Only 147 have the strict one.
27.31% of the population these estimates cover. China alone is 1,409 million of it, published at 96.12% basic.
Australia and Saudi Arabia are on this list. Whatever the missing rung is, it is not simply a matter of a country being too poor to run the survey.
Where both figures exist, the distance between them is the distance between “there is a tap within half an hour” and “the tap is here, it works, and the water is clean”. Across 147 countries the median distance is 18.4 points.
Across 147 countries reporting both. 38 of them are forty points or more apart.
The widest of any country over twenty million people: a 77.15-point drop between the generous rung and the strict one.
A 47.38-point difference. Both numbers are true and they describe very different mornings.
Target 6.1 is universal and equitable access to safe drinking water by 2030. The world moved from 61.26% to 73.74% between 2000 and 2024. That is 0.52 points a year, and the arithmetic from there is not complicated.
From 61.26% in 2000 to 73.74% in 2024, straight-line across the whole published series.
If that rate simply continues. That is 45 years after the target, and later still for anywhere starting lower than the world average.
Lower in 2022 than in 2015, the year the goals were adopted. The world total still rose, which is what an average over unequal parts does.
The same ladder, split by residence. Worldwide the urban figure is 83.51% and the rural figure is 55.87% — a 27.64-point gap that a national average hides in exactly the way an annual average hides an hourly one.
Against 55.87% rural: a 27.64-point gap in 2022.
The widest urban–rural split of any country over twenty million people, from 38.74% rural to 81.81% urban.
Small, and not zero. The rule has exceptions and this page would rather name them than round them off.
This page is mostly about a number that is missing or overstated, so it is worth being clear where the data shows real and large improvement. Open defecation fell from 21.05% of the world in 2000 to 4.34% — and that series is measured, not modelled.
Share of the world's population. The bottom rung of the sanitation ladder, and the one that moved most.
A fall of roughly three quarters in a quarter century. Progress at the bottom of a ladder is easier to make and easier to measure than progress at the top.
Countries with a basic sanitation figure and no safely-managed one, covering 990 million people. The same hole, in the other ladder.
These figures come from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme. Two organisations republish them and neither carries the whole series, so both are read and every overlapping value is compared.
Every country-year-indicator pair the two publishers share is compared and the fetch aborts if any disagrees. 19,177 pairs overlap and the worst disagreement is 0.0 points. That verifies the copies match each other, not that the underlying estimates are right.
970 pairs appear only in WHO's copy and 4,003 only in the World Bank's. Reading either alone would have quietly dropped part of the record, and the union is what this page uses.
WHO publishes open defecation at country level with a null in the numeric field and a whole-percent string beside it. Reading it the way every other indicator here is read drops 14,023 rows while the request still returns 200. It is taken from the World Bank instead and checked against WHO's rounded copy, where the worst gap across 4,993 pairs is exactly half a point — which is what rounding to a whole number allows and no more.
A share of a population is a modelled estimate built from household surveys and censuses, not a meter reading. Four limits matter for everything above.
The 62 countries with no safely-managed figure are excluded from every average on this page rather than counted as zero. That is the honest treatment and it also means every world figure here describes the countries that report, not the world.
JMP fits a regression through survey points, so a country's annual series is smoother than reality and a single year's change is rarely a single year's event. This is why the page reads 2015 against 2022 rather than year on year.
Only 91 of the 214 countries have a basic-handwashing figure and 123 do not, so no world map is drawn from it here. It is in the CSVs for anyone who wants it, with the gaps visible.
The urban and rural split above is one cut of that, and it is the only one these estimates support. A national figure of 73.74% says nothing about which households inside the country are in the other 26.26%.
Every figure on this page traces to one of these, through a CSV in
data/global-water/. Each is checked against its source query on every
build.
Population using at least basic and safely managed drinking water and sanitation, basic handwashing facilities, and WASH-attributable mortality, by country and by urban/rural residence, 2000-2024 — OData API, no key and no account. WHO's publication of the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme estimates. Read as the main source because it splits urban from rural, which the World Bank's copy does not.
The same JMP series (SH.H2O.BASW.ZS, SH.H2O.SMDW.ZS, SH.STA.BASS.ZS, SH.STA.SMSS.ZS, SH.STA.HYGN.ZS, SH.STA.ODFC.ZS), plus population (SP.POP.TOTL), region and income group — No key. Used for the cross-check, for population, and as the source of open defecation, which GHO publishes at country level only as a whole-percent string.
The originating estimates behind both APIs above — Cited for provenance. Neither API is read as an independent measurement of the world: they are two publications of one set of JMP estimates, and the cross-check between them verifies that the copies agree, not that the estimates are right.
The definition of target 6.1 and of indicator 6.1.1, safely managed drinking water — The target is universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 2030. Indicator 6.1.1 is the safely-managed share used throughout this page.