Islamabad: Despite more taps and pipelines, millions of Pakistanis still struggle with unreliable and unsafe drinking water, reflecting a global crisis that continues to leave one in four people without safe supply.
A new WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) report Progress on Household Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene 2000–2024: Special Focus on Inequalities, launched during World Water Week 2025, shows that while access has expanded, major gaps remain for low-income countries like Pakistan where water is often unavailable when needed or contaminated before use.
The global findings are stark as 2.1 billion people lack safely managed drinking water, including 106 million who still drink directly from rivers, ponds or other untreated surface sources.
Some 3.4 billion people lack safely managed sanitation, and 1.7 billion have no basic hygiene services. People in the least developed countries are more than twice as likely to be without even basic water and sanitation compared to other parts of the world, with fragile contexts facing deficits nearly 40 percentage points worse than stable countries.
Pakistan features prominently in the report because household surveys from Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and Azad Jammu & Kashmir captured not just access but also reliability and safety.
One revealing detail: in several provinces, unimproved wells and springs were more likely to provide water “when needed” than piped systems, showing that infrastructure alone does not guarantee dependable supply.
Data from national testing also confirmed microbial contamination in water stored at homes—mirroring a regional pattern where water that appears clean at the source often becomes unsafe by the time families drink it.
For millions of women and girls in Pakistan and across Central and South Asia, the burden is compounded by the time lost to fetching water.
In fragile contexts worldwide, households depend disproportionately on women and girls to spend over 30 minutes daily collecting water, often at the expense of education, health and income.
These inequities—by geography, wealth, gender and age—are at the heart of what the report calls a deepening divide as the world approaches the last five years of the SDG period.
Globally, progress since 2015 has been too slow. Safely managed drinking water rose from 68% to 74%, but achieving universal coverage by 2030 will require an eightfold acceleration.
Rural areas made modest gains, from 50% to 60% coverage, but urban areas have stagnated at 83%. The report stresses that universal access to even basic water, sanitation and hygiene services (SDG target 1.4) requires tripling the current pace, while the higher standard of safe, reliable services (SDG 6.1 and 6.2) appears increasingly out of reach.
“Water, sanitation and hygiene are not privileges, they are basic human rights,” said Dr Ruediger Krech, Director for Environment, Climate Change and Health at WHO.
UNICEF’s WASH Director Cecilia Scharp added: “When children lack access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene, their health, education and futures are put at risk. At the current pace, the promise of safe water and sanitation for every child is slipping further from reach—we must act faster and more boldly to reach those who need it most”.
For Pakistan, the policy message is urgent. Expanding coverage must go hand-in-hand with ensuring reliability, water safety and equity. Otherwise, families will continue to hedge with unsafe wells or tankers, and girls will continue losing time and opportunities fetching water. Without stronger investment in safe storage, chlorination, and on-premises supply, the gap between “access” and truly safe drinking water will remain wide—placing millions at continued risk of disease and exclusion.
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