Two billion people don’t have safe drinking water: what does this really mean for them?

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.1