Summary of People Without Improved Water

Introduction

In this article, we’ll present a summary of the People-without-improved-water dataset, which explores estimated counts (globally, by country) of people without regular access to clean water. As an example of the data structure, see below:

                          Entity Code Year Number.of.people
1                    Afghanistan  AFG 2020          9132995
41                 Cote d'Ivoire  CIV 2020          5316675
81                       Iceland  ISL 2020                0
121                       Monaco  MCO 2020                0
161                  Saint Lucia  LCA 2020             2381
201 United States Virgin Islands  VIR 2020             1338
241                 Burkina Faso  BFA 2000          3758041
281                       Gambia  GMB 2000           215574
321                    Lithuania  LTU 2000           361756
361             Papua New Guinea  PNG 2000          3827159

Note that, in its raw format, the dataset has readings from two years, both 2000 and 2020. Additionally, some of the rows have a Number.of.people value of 0, which “seems” unrealistic. However, we will leave such values in so as to maintain simplicity; we wouldn’t want to risk removing data that is potentially accurate without knowing more about the collection process.

Some questions may come to mind when examining this dataset. Specifically, how has the proportion of people without access to clean drinking water changed from 2000 to 2020? Which countries contribute most to the global population of clean water-insecure people?

Summary

[1] "Count of people without clean water in 2000: 963413295"

[1] "Global percentage: 15.79%"

[1] "Count of people without clean water in 2020: 485363567"

[1] "Global percentage: 6.22%"

As we can see, the global count of people lacking clean water dropped by nearly 50% from 2000 to 2020. The effect is even more pronounced when adjusting for global population:

Clearly, the global proportion has reduced significantly, by almost 10%. Although this is speculative, the proportion could realistically be well below 5% by the year 2040.

Further Research

It would have been incredible to have country population estimates in the dataset as well as the counts of those without clean water. A clear additional item for study would be which countries have the highest and lowest proportions of overall population lacking clean water. I did try to find such a global population dataset, but the process got too complicated for this (short) summary.

It may also be reasonable to examine which countries had the largest and smallest change in either absolute or proportional counts of those lacking clean water.