What Are Some Water Stressed Countries? Where Does GFA World Serve?

Water stress
What is water stress?
Water stressed countries
How many people lack access to clean water?

The WHO and UNICEF list ten water stressed countries, those with the worst drinking water.1 They include:

MexicoBottled water is the primary source of drinking water in Mexico.
CongoThe rural areas of Congo suffer the most from water stress. Only 21% of people have access to water in their local community.
PakistanThere is a large gap in resources and hygiene between the rich and poor.
BhutanOnly 1/3 of managed drinking water is clean.
GhanaSanitation services are very limited in Ghana.
NepalOpen defecation is a major issue in Nepal, creating contaminated water sources.
CambodiaDelivered water is essential to many communities.
NigeriaFifteen percent of the people still drink from unimproved water sources.
EthiopiaThere are wide differences between rural and urban water resources.
UgandaAlmost 40% of people travel more than 30 minutes for water.

GFA World has been committed to helping countries in Asia since 1979, many of which are water stressed, and we recently began serving in Rwanda as well.

  • India, the seventh largest economy in the world,2 has over 1.34 billion citizens. An Indian think tank released a comprehensive report on India’s water status. It reported that 200,000 Indians die each year from lack of clean water and 600 million Indians face high to extreme water stress.3
  • Bangladesh has a fluctuating water situation, due to their monsoon seasons. Even so, the WHO estimates that 60% of the population has unsafe drinking water.
  • In Myanmar, it is estimated that 9.7 million people don’t have clean water access.4
  • In Nepal, one in ten people lacks clean water.5
  • Sri Lanka has made significant improvements in their water supply. Even so, more needs to be done.
Learn More About Water Stress

1 https://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/publications/jmp-2017/en/
2 World Economic Outlook Database. International Monetary Fund. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2018/02/weodata. Accessed January 24, 2019.
3 NITI Aayog, Composite Water Management Index: A Tool for Water Management, p. 15. June 2018.
4 https://www.wateraid.org/au/where-we-work/myanmar
5 https://www.wateraid.org/us/where-we-work/nepal