Sources and methods
How this drinking-water story was built
WHO/UNICEF JMP household release, August 2025. The story selects 2015–2024 and uses published WORLD aggregates, not a sum of available country estimates.
The two source workbooks
JMP_2025_REG.xlsx supplies the global coverage estimates, world population and urban population share. The unformatted wat tab contains decimals. The selected record is WORLD, rows 442–451 for 2015–2024.
JMP_2025_WLD.xlsx contains country, area and territory estimates and was used to confirm the schema and scope. It was not used to reconstruct global coverage from countries with available estimates. Both uploaded workbooks identify the August 2025 release and have been retained unchanged in the private project archive.
Official JMP downloads · File hashes and provenance
Hashes identify the uploaded bytes. They are not an independent publisher authentication or a comparison with a second download. Original workbooks are not included in the public website package.
From coverage to population counts
The native population field pop_t is in thousands; percentages are expressed on a 0–100 scale. Missing cells remain missing. All selected WORLD fields needed for the story are numeric.
World population: pop_t × 1,000.
Urban population: world population × prop_u / 100.
Rural population: world population × (1 − prop_u / 100).
People in a service category: corresponding residence population × coverage percentage / 100.
Basic only: at least basic percentage − safely managed percentage.
Lacking safely managed: 100 − safely managed percentage.
Counts are WSI calculations from the unrounded source fields, not independently published headcounts. The five service-ladder categories are mutually exclusive within the same year and population. “At least basic” includes safely managed, so it must not be added to safely managed or basic only.
The official report rounds the 2024 deficit to 2.1 billion. This story’s detailed chart uses 2.15 billion. Both describe the same estimate at different display precision. Charts generally use one decimal for percentages, two decimals for billions and whole millions for smaller counts. CSVs retain calculation precision; extra digits are not a claim of measurement accuracy.
Keep the rural–urban residual visible
Applying the published world urban share to the published rural and urban coverage estimates does not reproduce the world deficit perfectly. World minus the sum of residence-derived deficits is about 0.105 million people in 2015 and 0.124 million in 2024 (less than 0.006% of the world deficit in each year).
Those differences are retained and documented, not redistributed or silently corrected. The chart uses each source coverage series as published and labels the counts as derived. The interpretation does not depend on treating those totals as exactly additive.
What the estimates do not establish
The service requirements in Figure 2 overlap. They are not additive scores, and the diagram is not a direct census of every household meeting all three conditions. JMP combines survey, census and administrative information through its estimation methods; its component series should not be summed to create a new safely managed estimate.
The selected table provides point estimates without interval fields. No uncertainty ranges or significance tests have been invented. Changes are descriptive differences between annual estimates, not tracked individual transitions or causal effects.
The story does not cover sanitation, handwashing, schools or healthcare facilities. It does not attribute deaths to drinking-water conditions, rank countries, or convert access deficits to USU. No aggregation with the site’s mortality, hunger or displacement totals is authorized.
Official references and reuse
- WHO/UNICEF JMP: Progress on household drinking water, sanitation and hygiene 2000–2024, August 2025.
- JMP Downloads: Household Regions and Household World files.
- JMP drinking-water service definitions.
- JMP estimation methods. Use the source release’s methodology and annexes for detailed technical interpretation; this story does not recalculate JMP’s country models.
WSI charts, explanatory text and calculations are attributed to World Suffering Index; the underlying estimates remain attributable to WHO/UNICEF JMP. Source publishers’ terms continue to apply to their material. Cite both the original estimates and the WSI calculation or graphic; do not imply endorsement by WHO or UNICEF.
Story v1.0 · Website package v2.8.0 · 18 September 2026. Reusable findings and citations.