Hygiene and Handwashing

Having access to basic handwashing facilities is important to reduce the spread of infectious diseases and pathogens.

But more than 40% of the world do not have access to safe sanitation. This is major health risk. Unsafe sanitation is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year.

In this article we give an overview of global and national data on access to sanitation, and its impact on health outcomes.

Lack of access to handwashing facilities is a large risk factor for death

Lack of access to handwashing facilities is responsible for more than half a million deaths each year

Having no access to basic handwashing facilities is a large health and environmental problem – particularly for the poorest in the world.

The Global Burden of Disease is a major global study on the causes and risk factors for death and disease published in the medical journal The Lancet.

These estimates of the annual number of deaths attributed to a wide range of risk factors are shown here.

In the chart we see that it ranks as a very important risk factor for death globally.

According to the Global Burden of Disease study more than half a million people die as a result of having no access to handwashing facilities every year. To put this into context: it’s almost double the number of homicides.

Death rates are much higher in low-income countries

Death rates from a lack of access to handwashing give us an accurate comparison of differences in its mortality impacts between countries and over time. In contrast to the share of deaths that we studied before, death rates are not influenced by how other causes or risk factors for death are changing.

In this map we see death rates from having no access to handwashing facilities across the world. Death rates measure the number of deaths per 100,000 people in a given country or region.

What becomes clear is the large differences in death rates between countries: rates are high in lower-income countries, particularly across Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

The issue of handwashing access is one which is largely limited to low and lower-middle income countries.

Access to handwashing facilities

What share of people do not have access to basic handwashing?

Nearly one-third of the world do not have access to basic handwashing facilities

Hygiene and handwashing is included in SDG Target 6.2, to: “achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation” by 2030.

In 2020, around 70% of the world population had access to basic handwashing facilities. That is, handwashing facilities with soap and water. That means nearly one-third had to rely on washing facilities without soap, or none at all.

In the chart we see the breakdown of hygiene access globally, and across regions and income groups. In Sub-Saharan Africa only one-in-four people had access to facilities with soap and water.

The world is making progress on this problem. In 2015, 67% of the global population had basic handwashing facilities. That means we’ve seen an increase of four percentage points over five years.

But to achieve universal handwashing by 2030, this progress needs to go much faster.

In the map shown we see the share of people across the world that have access to basic handwashing facilities. This is, handwashing facilities with soap and water.

How many people do not have access to basic handwashing?

In the map shown we see the number of people across the world that do not have access to basic handwashing facilities.

Hannah Ritchie, Fiona Spooner and Max Roser (2021) - "Hygiene and Handwashing". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/hygiene' [Online Resource]

@article{owid-hygiene,
    author = {Hannah Ritchie and Fiona Spooner and Max Roser},
    title = {Hygiene and Handwashing},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2021},
    note = {https://ourworldindata.org/hygiene}
}

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