Global Facts and Comparative Stats on Water and Sanitation

• "Together, unclean water and poor sanitation are the world's second biggest killer of children."
• "...unclean water and poor sanitation have claimed more lives over the past century than any other cause—and in many developing countries they continue to do so."
• "Globally, diarrhea kills more people than tuberculosis or malaria—five times as many children die of diarrhea as of HIV and AIDS."
• "Delivering clean water, removing waste water, and providing sanitation are three of the most basic foundations for human progress."
• "The 1.8 million child deaths each year related to unclean water and poor sanitation dwarf the casualties associated with violent conflict. No act of terrorism generates economic devastation on the scale of the crisis in water and sanitation."
• "Some 1.8 million child deaths each year are a result of diarrhea—or an under-five population equivalent in size to that for London and New York combined."
• "The $10 billion price tag for the Millennium Development Goal seems a large sum (to meet the MDG for Water and Sanitation)—but it has to be put into context. It represents less than five day's worth of global military spending and less than half what rich countries spend each year on mineral water."
• "The 25 billion liters of mineral water consumed annually by U.S. households exceeds the entire clean water consumption of the 2.7 million people in Senegal lacking access to an improved water source."
• "On average, people in the United States use more than 400 liters" of water a day.
• "Residents of Phoenix, Arizona, a desert city with some of the greenest lawns in the United States, use more than 1,000 liters a day. By contrast, average use in countries such as Mozambique is less than 10 liters."
• "While basic needs vary, the minimum threshold is about 20 liters a day. Most of the 1.1 billion people categorized as lacking access to clean water use about 5 liters a day—one-tenth of the average daily amount used in rich countries to flush toilets."
• "Clean water and sanitation would save the lives of countless children, support progress in education and liberate people from the illnesses that keep them in poverty."
• "Dripping taps in rich countries lose more water than is available each day to more than 1 billion people."
• "When an American person showers, he or she is using more water than is available to hundreds of millions of individuals living in urban slums or arid areas of the developing world."
• "Water and Sanitation are some of the most powerful interventions available to...reduce infectious disease."
• "Cross-country studies show that the method of disposing excreta is one of the strongest determinants of child survival: the transition from unimproved to improved sanitation reduces overall child mortality by about a third."
• "With support from aid donors, even the poorest countries have the capacity to mobilize the resources to achieve change."
• "Within a generation the global crisis in water and sanitation could be consigned to history. The world has the technology, the finance, and the human capacity to remove the blight of water insecurity from millions of lives."
• "Water-related diseases cost 443 million school days each year—equivalent to an entire school year for all seven-year-olds in Ethiopia."
• "One estimate suggests that some 40 billion hours a year are spent collecting water in Sub-Saharan Africa—a year's labor for the entire workforce in France."