Progress on household drinking water, sanitation and hygiene 2000-2024: Special focus on inequalities: Issued recently by UNICEF and WHO-August 2025
Between 2015 and 2024, 961million people gained access to safely managed drinking water services, increasing global coverage from 68% to 74%. Rural coverage rose from 50% to 60%, while urban coverage remained steady at 83%. Despite this progress, 2.1 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, 1.4 billion rely on basic services, 287 million on limited services, 302 million use unimproved sources, and 106 million continue to drink surface water. The number of people using surface water has decreased by 61 million over the same period. The estimates for safely managed services are available for 160 countries across six out of eight SDG regions.
