Water and Sanitation

Overview

In large regions of Africa, accessibility to safe drinking water and basic sanitation facilities is still scarce. The following maps show progress towards the UN Millenium Development Goal 7C, which is to reduce the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 50 % between 1990 and 2015.

How to use and read the maps

Currently, the web maps work in Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome.

• use the zoom controls to zoom in (+) and out (-) of Africa
• click on a country to see a pop up which provides detailed data
• the legend in the lower left corner shows categories
• to see terms and definitions, please refer to our data section by clicking the about the data button above

Access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation

The first two maps provide an insight into the current state of progress. The darker a country's colour, the better the progress towards reaching the goal of reducing the population without access to safe water or basic sanitation by at least 50 % has been made by 2015 (compared to 1990). In lightly coloured countries however, there is little or no progress since 1990.

Additional maps

The following two maps highlight related aspects of accessibility to water and sanitation. Inadequate hand washing and the practice of open defecation are two major causes of risk of disease, since bacteria, viruses and parasites found in human excreta contaminate water resources, soil and food. Hand washing with soap and running water and using toilets which separate human waste from human contact instead of defecating in the open are two of the most effective ways to prevent the spread of diseases.

The darker the green, the higher the proportion of the population with a hand washing facility with soap at home. In contrast, the darker the brown, the higher the proportion of the 2015 population still practicing open defecation.