Hygiene and Handwashing

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

However, more than 20% of the world’s population does not have access to basic handwashing facilities. That is, handwashing facilities with soap and water.

This is a major health risk. Lack of access to basic hygiene facilities 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 basic hygiene facilities 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, this is more than the number of homicides.

Death rates are much higher in low-income countries

Death rates from a lack of access to handwashing facilities give us an accurate comparison of differences in mortality impacts between countries and over time.

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 that 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?

Approximately one-third of the world does not have access to basic handwashing facilities.

Hygiene and handwashing are 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 recent years, around three-quarters of the world's population has had access to basic handwashing facilities. That means about one-quarter had to rely on washing facilities without soap and/or water or no handwashing facilities at all.

In the map, we see the share of people across the world who have access to basic handwashing facilities. In countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, typically, less than half of the population has access to facilities with soap and water.

The world is making progress on this problem. Access to basic handwashing facilities has gradually been increasing for the global population. But to achieve universal handwashing by 2030, this progress needs to go much faster.

How many people do not have access to basic handwashing?

In the map shown, we see the number of people across the world who 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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