Improved but not necessarily safe: Water access and the Millennium Development Goals

July 9th, 2012

Robert Bain, Jim Wright, Hong Yang, Steve Pedley, Stephen Gundry & Jamie Bartram

In early 2012, the United Nations announced that the drinking-water target of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) had been reached in 2010: in two decades, and five years ahead of schedule, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking-water had been halved1. Whilst this undoubtedly represents a major achievement, fundamental concerns regarding the monitoring of safe water have been gaining prominence2.

The measure used to assess progress towards the MDG target is use of an improved source; these are water sources that were considered likely to provide safe drinking-water (Table 1). Consequently, this approach is an assessment of specific types of water sources rather than the quality of the water they provide. Improved sources do not always supply safe water due to the presence of microbial or chemical contamination. In order to explore the scale of this discrepancy and how it might be addressed in monitoring, the Joint Monitoring Programme of the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) commissioned a number of nationally representative studies. These Rapid Assessment of Drinking-Water Quality (RADWQ) studies were conducted in Ethiopia, Jordan, Nicaragua, Nigeria, and Tajikistan between 2004 and 2005.

In recent work4, we sought to determine how these data on water source quality would affect assessments of progress towards the 2015 (MDG) target in these countries. We adjusted reported coverage estimates for the following water quality parameters: thermotolerant coliform bacteria, arsenic, fluoride and nitrates. Accounting for compliance with the WHO Guidelines for Drinking-Water Quality for these parameters substantially lowers estimates of ‘safe’ water use in four of the five countries (see Figure 1). In the countries with the largest populations, Ethiopia and Nigeria, the adjustment represents an additional 8.9 and 22 million people without safe water in 2008. Across the five countries, the adjustment reduces reported access by 32 million people – a sizeable difference when compared to the 70 million that have begun to use improved water sources in these countries between 1990 and 2008.

The RADWQ studies show marked differences between countries, not only in the extent of the adjustment, but also in the likelihood of particular supply types being contaminated. For example, in Nigeria boreholes were more likely to be compliant (86%) than piped supplies (77%), whereas in Ethiopia the reverse was the case (80% versus 66% respectively). The compliance rate of improved sources is also likely to vary considerably within countries, for example between urban and rural areas or socio-economic groups. Further research is required to understand the distribution of improved but unsafe supplies. As these data highlight, there remains a need for substantial improvement of ‘improved sources’.

Studies in a number of other countries also highlight the discrepancy between improved water sources and the provision of water that is free of chemical and microbial contamination. For example, a preliminary study shows the Chinese population that gained access to safe water between 1990 and 2010 is at most 330 million, whereas 457 million people are reported as having gained access to an improved source during the same period5.

The magnitude of the problem globally has also been estimated. Given that nationally representative water quality data are only available through RADWQ for five countries and that results vary greatly between countries, this exercise requires a range of assumptions. However, when water quality is incorporated, global estimates of those without safe water range from 1.8 to 1.9 billion6,7 – over a quarter of the 2010 world population and more than double the reported population not using improved sources.

This work shows that interpretation of the MDG indicator as a surrogate for safe water can lead to substantial overestimates of the population using safe drinking-water and, consequently, also overestimates the progress made towards the 2015 MDG target. There are important policy implications – whilst progress has been made, adjusting for water quality shows that much of the world’s population still lacks access to safe water.

References:

1. WHO / UNICEF (2012), Progress on sanitation and drinking-water: 2012 update. Geneva: World Health Organization Press.

2. Harmon, K. (2012), Improved but Not Always Safe: Despite Global Efforts, More Than 1 Billion People Likely at Risk for Lack of Clean Water, Scientific American, 21st May 2012.

3. WHO / UNICEF (2012), Joint Monitoring Programme Water and Sanitation Categories, http://www.wssinfo.org/definitions-methods/watsan-categories/.

4. Bain, R. E. S., Gundry, S. W., Wright, J. A., Yang, H., Pedley, S., and Bartram, J. K. (2012), Accounting for water quality in monitoring access to safe drinking-water as part of the Millennium Development Goals: lessons from five countries, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Vol. 90, pp. 228-235A.

5. Yang, H., Wright, J. A., and Gundry, S. W. (2012), Water accessibility: Boost water safety in rural China. Nature, Vol. 484, pp. 318.

6. Payen, G. (2011), Worldwide needs for safe drinking water are underestimated: billions of people are impacted. Originally published as: Le Droit à l’eau potable et à l’assainissement, Sa mise en uvre en Europe, Académie de l’Eau, Smets et al., 2011, p. 45-63.

7. Onda K., LoBuglio J., and Bartram, J. (2012), Global Access to Safe Water: Accounting for Water Quality and the Resulting Impact on MDG Progress, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Vol. 9, No.3, pp. 880-894.

Robert Bain is a Research Assistant at the University of Bristol and works within the Water and Health Research Centre, which is led by Professor Stephen Gundry. Dr Jim Wright is a Lecturer at the University of Southampton. Dr Hong Yang is a Research Fellow also at University of Southampton, where he works on water pollution and aquatic environment change. Dr Stephen Pedley is a Reader in the Division of Civil and Chemical Engineering, University of Surrey. Professor Jamie Bartram is the Don and Jennifer Holzworth Distinguished Professor of Environmental Sciences and Engineering and Director of the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This article is based on an original article published by the above authors in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization Vol. 90, pp. 228-235A entitled ‘Accounting for water quality in monitoring access to safe drinking-water as part of the Millennium Development Goals: lessons from five countries‘. For more information please contact Robert Bain at robert.bain@bristol.ac.uk.

The views expressed in this article belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.