2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

Summary

Two billion people don’t have safe drinking water: what does this really mean for them?For billions, it can mean hours spent collecting water. For almost a million, it means dying from disease.In the time it would take me to write the next sentence, I could get up, walk to the kitchen, and pour myself a glass of clean water. I’ve never had to worry about whether that water would make me sick.Almost six billion other people in the world share this reality. They have safe drinking water in their homes, ready whenever needed.That still leaves two billion people without. That’s the most important number in this article: two billion people who don’t have safe water to drink.But these large numbers can seem abstract. It’s not clear what this means in practice. If people don’t have safe water, what are they drinking? What does it mean for their daily lives?Here, I want to answer these questions and bring a more human perspective that sometimes gets lost when we’re talking about millions or billions of people.Before we get into some of the personal stories and accounts, it’s important to understand how levels of drinking water services are defined and how many people fall on each “rung” of the ladder. I’ve summarized this in the diagram below based on data from the WHO and UNICEF.1For someone to have “safe drinking water”, their water source needs to meet three criteria: it needs to be free from contamination, located at home, and available whenever needed. Again, this is the reality for almost six billion people.What are the other two billion drinking? If you’d asked me in the past, I might have guessed that most people without safe drinking water were collecting water from streams or lakes. The world was binary: you either had safe piped water or were collecting it from a river. But that’s not the reality: people collecting surface water are in the minority. Only around 156 million people get their water this way. That’s 1.4% of the global population.The vast majority of ...