Foreign aid Significantly more people without clean drinking water than expected

More than half of the world's population has no access to safe drinking water. In a new study, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) estimate the number of people without an adequate supply of drinking water at 4.4 billion.

"Access to clean drinking water is a human right," emphasized first author Esther Greenwood in an interview with the Keystone-SDA news agency. Estimating the number of people for whom this right is violated is important.

So far, however, the problem seems to have been underestimated: The World Health Organization (WHO) and the children's charity Unicef estimated the number of people without safe drinking water in 2020 at two billion. According to Greenwood, the reason for the previous underestimation is a lack of data.

Pollution is the biggest problem for drinking water, as the study published on Thursday in the journal Science shows. In 135 countries surveyed, the drinking water of almost half of the population was contaminated with faeces.

SDA