Progress on sanitation and drinking-water : 2013 update

This Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation reports on access to drinking-water and sanitation worldwide and on progress towards related targets under Millennium Development Goal 7 "to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation". This 2013 update presents country and regional estimates for the year 2011 and global trends in sanitation, open defecation and access to drinking-water for the period 1990-2011. It also introduces the process of formulating proposals for post-2015 targets and corresponding indicators for water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH).

Since the JMP 2012 update, which presented 2010 estimates,  results of 230 surveys have been added to the JMP database, bringing the total number of surveys in the JMP database close to 1700. As is to be expected from an annual update, the global estimates have hardly changed. Drinking- water coverage in 2011 remains at 89% – which is 1% above the MDG drinking-water target. In 2011, 768 million people relied on unimproved drinking-water sources.

Sanitation coverage in 2011 was 64%. The world remains off track to meet the MDG sanitation target of 75% and if current trends continue, it is set to miss the target by more than half a billion people. By the end of 2011, there were 2.5 billion people who still did not use an improved sanitation facility. The number of people practising open defecation decreased to a little over 1 billion, but this still represents 15% of the global population. [authors abstract]