Imagine if turning on your tap and getting a glass of clean water was a luxury. For billions of people, it is.
A new report from the World Health Organization has some eye-popping numbers:
-
1 in 4 people on the planet don’t have safe drinking water at home. That’s over 2 billion people.
-
Even more, 3.4 billion, don’t have reliable access to a safe toilet.
-
About 354 million people have no toilet at all and are forced to relieve themselves outside.
To understand what that’s actually like, we talked to Amaka Godfrey. She grew up in Nigeria and now works for the non-profit WaterAid. She knows this life because she lived it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
So, what was it like growing up without reliable water and a toilet?
I live in London now, but I grew up in southeastern Nigeria.
My earliest memory of a toilet was a bucket in a room that smelled horrible. You could see human waste and maggots. It was traumatizing and has stayed with me forever.
Later, my family moved to an apartment with an actual toilet! But the running water only came on occasionally. You couldn’t just flush it. So, we’d save the dirty water from washing clothes and use that to flush the toilet. You get very creative.
What about at school? Did your school have water?
My primary school had no water at all. The idea that a school would have water never even occurred to me.
Every single student, no matter how small, had to drag a 5-liter (1.3-gallon) can of water to school every day. Part of it was for the teachers, and the rest went into a big communal bucket for our whole classroom.
A communal bucket? For drinking?
Yes! We all had our own plastic cups with our names on them hanging on a pole. At break time, everyone would just dip their cup into the same bucket of water.
Where did kids get this water to bring?
I was one of the lucky ones—I could get water from my apartment. But most of my classmates weren’t so lucky. They had to fetch water from a local stream on their way to school. I vividly remember some children drowning during the rainy season when the stream swelled.
It got even more intense when you went to boarding school.
The toilets there were the stuff of nightmares. The worst punishment was being forced to clean them, which meant literally scooping poop.
Water was so scarce that we all had to keep our personal water supply in a jerry can. Stealing water was a huge problem! People would chain their can to their bed at night. It got so bad that kids started bringing tubes to siphon water from each other’s cans.
You eventually went to school in the UK. That must have been a shock.
It was mind-blowing! I asked my tutor, “Where can I buy a jerry can?” He was so confused.
He finally said, “You’re in England now. You don’t need a jerry can. Anytime you want water, you just turn on the tap. There will be water.”
It felt like the ultimate privilege. I actually got mad once listening to other students complain. I stood up and said, “You are all so lazy! You wake up, take a shower, flush the toilet, and never have to think about where the water comes from!”
The WHO report shows billions still live that way. What did you think?
It’s great that we’re tracking this. It shows how water and toilets are linked to everything else—health, the economy, safety for women. It puts the problem on the global agenda.
The report isn’t all bad news. Since 2000, over 2 billion people have gained access to safe water. Where are you seeing progress?
Progress is happening! I visited a rural community in Ethiopia eight years ago where people had to dig near streams for water. I recently went back, and now they have a solar-powered water system with water flowing from taps. It was incredible to see.
So what’s working?
There’s more awareness that this is a basic need for any society to thrive. There’s better technology, like those solar-powered systems. And there are more trained people on the ground helping communities and governments.
Yet, huge gaps remain. Where?
Rural areas are still hard to reach. But the big new problem is in cities. Populations in developing countries are exploding, and the old pipes and systems can’t keep up. We’re trying to fix a leaky boat while more and more people are jumping on board.
What will it take to finally fix this?
We need a lot more money. We’re racing against a fast-growing population.
Most importantly, we need to get young people involved. They are the majority of the population in these places. We need them to understand that without water and toilets, nothing else—health, education, business—can really work.
I hope I live to see the day when this is solved. I’ll be watching as a very old, very happy African woman.