Water safety planning: What have we learned so far?

Overview

WHO remains concerned that close to 30% of the global population lack access to safely managed drinkingwater services and 829,000 people continue to die annually from poor WASH. Consequently, WHO has identified “safely managed water” as a priority and one of its Organization-wide impact target. To tackle this, WHO has been intensely promoting a water safety plan (WSP) approach, which is the centre-piece recommendation of its Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality. Some candid observations and ideas for future WSP programme strengthening are described in this paper.