Despite being essential for health, education, and resilience, WASH remains one of the most underfunded sectors in international aid — leaving billions without access to safe water or sanitation.
In the global race to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, water, sanitation, and hygiene — collectively known as WASH — are falling dangerously behind. The sector underpins nearly every other development target, from keeping children in school to ensuring hospitals can function. Yet it rarely makes headlines and remains chronically underfunded.
The numbers are staggering. According to the latest World Health Organization and UNICEF data :
- 2.1 billion people — one in four globally — still lack access to safely managed drinking water.
- 3.4 billion people live without safe sanitation.
The consequences are deadly. In April, five children in Sudan died of cholera after drinking from an unsafe water source — a disease identified as waterborne more than 170 years ago.
“This need was understood so long ago,” said Tim Wainwright, CEO of the nonprofit WaterAid. “I do get quite annoyed about this.”
RELEVANT SUSTAINABLE GOALS
A $500 Billion Gap — and Counting
Closing the WASH gap requires massive investment. The World Bank estimates a $140.8 billion annual public sector shortfall to meet global water goals by 2030. The World Economic Forum puts the figure much higher, at $500 billionwhen all related needs are included. Only the energy sector faces a larger funding gap.
But instead of expanding support, some countries are cutting back. The United Kingdom has slashed its official development assistance for WASH by 82 percent since 2018, now ranking last among 10 aid sectors.
The result: preventable deaths from diarrheal disease, growing inequality, and stalled progress in education and health.
“This is a silent emergency,” Wainwright said.
Why Water Doesn’t Get Funded
Experts point to a mix of politics, philosophy, and inefficiency. Joel Kolker, former global lead for water and finance at the World Bank, said water often falls into a gray zone: is it a human right or an economic commodity?
“Every year at the World Bank annual meetings, there are protests about free water,” Kolker said. “If you want to argue that water is a human right, you put public money into it. You pay for it.
Wainwright echoed the sentiment: “Of course it’s a human right, as is food. But no one argues that you shouldn’t pay a bit of money for food.”
Another challenge: inefficiency. A World Bank review found that between 2009 and 2020, more than 25 percent of allocated water funds went unused due to poor planning and limited local capacity.
“How can you be advocating for more money when you’re not even spending the money you have?” Kolker asked.
The Cost of Inaction
For the world’s poorest, the water crisis is already a daily burden. In some places, households spend up to 15 percent of their income on water services, often of questionable quality.
“At the moment, it’s scandalous because the poorest pay far more,” Wainwright said.
Climate change is tightening the squeeze. Droughts are drying aquifers. In Syria, a July report from Mercy Corps found wheat production plummeting by 70 percent in some regions due to collapsing water systems. The Euphrates River has dropped nearly six meters, threatening irrigation, hydroelectric power, and national food security.
Without safe water, other pillars of development — health, education, agriculture — rest on shaky ground.
The situation is not hopeless. Several countries have shown what political will and targeted investment can achieve:
- South Korea: The “New Village Movement” in the 1970s drastically cut parasitic worm infections in schoolchildren, from over 80 percent in the 1960s to less than 1 percent by the 1990s.
- Malaysia: Expanded rural latrine programs in the 1980s, reducing diarrheal diseases.
- Thailand: A 40-year national sanitation campaign brought dramatic drops in child mortality.
Kolker argues that the challenge today is not infrastructure but institutional change — governments must commit to managing water systems effectively.
Can Private Capital Fill the Gap?
With aid cuts stalling projects, attention is turning to the private sector and blended finance.
“The private sector needs to step up in a major way,” said Alix Lebec, founder of LEBEC, a group focused on finance and philanthropy. “Private capital can provide flexibility, it can provide expertise. And if we can bring private finance together with philanthropy, we can create an investment-ready pipeline of water infrastructure deals.”
So far, progress has been piecemeal. Examples include:
- A public-private partnership in Kigali, Rwanda, to improve urban water supply.
- A green bond in Tanga, Tanzania, launched in 2024 to finance local water infrastructure.
- Rural irrigation projects in Morocco supported by the World Bank’s IFC.
Still, water remains overshadowed by energy, which has drawn steady investment for two decades.
“There’s always been this misconception that people living in poverty are a problem to be solved versus a market to be served,” Lebec said.
The path forward will require public investment, private innovation, and political leadership.
WASH may not be glamorous, but it is foundational. Without it, schools close, hospitals fail, crops wither, and preventable diseases claim millions of lives.
Kolker summed it up simply: “This is the direction we need to be going in.”
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