Almost every Bangladeshi has a water tap or tube well — but only 59% have water that is safely managed, and the cities are falling behind

Introduction

By the usual yardstick, Bangladesh has solved its drinking-water problem. In 2024, 98.8% of the population used at least a basic drinking-water service, up from 94.6% in 2000.¹ Open defecation, which affected 15.7% of people in 2000, has been recorded at zero since 2020.²

But the standard the world now uses to judge water and sanitation is “safely managed”, and by that measure the picture is much less comfortable. Only 59.1% of Bangladeshis used safely managed drinking water in 2024 — almost exactly the share in 2000 (55.3%) — and only 37.3% used safely managed sanitation.³⁴

98.8% vs 59.1%

Bangladeshis using basic drinking water, against safely managed drinking water, 2024.

All figures in this article are modelled estimates from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP), built from household surveys and censuses and published through the World Bank. They describe trends well but should not be read as annual counts.

What “safely managed” means

The gap between the two numbers is a matter of definition. A basic service is water from an improved source such as a piped supply, borehole or protected well. A safely managed service is, in the World Bank’s description of the JMP indicator, water from an improved source that is “accessible on premises, available when needed and free from fecal and priority chemical contamination”.³

So the 40% of people who are in the gap are not without water. They have a source — but it may be outside the home, intermittent, or contaminated. The data do not say which of these failures dominates; the JMP indicator combines them. Arsenic and faecal contamination of tube-well water are well documented in Bangladesh, but this article does not use a source that apportions the gap between causes, and so does not either.

The chart shows how different the two trends are. Basic access crept up by about four percentage points over 24 years because it started so high. Safely managed water, meanwhile, dipped slightly to 55.0% in 2010, climbed to 59.2% in 2021 and has been flat at about 59% since.³ A country that has spent decades extending access has not, on this measure, made its water safer.

The cities are now behind the countryside

The popular picture of safe services is urban. In Bangladesh it has reversed.

In 2000, safely managed drinking water reached 59.4% of rural people and 42.1% of urban people. In 2024 the figures were 62.5% rural and 54.3% urban — the urban share has risen by 12 points, but it still trails the rural share by 8.⁵⁶

Sanitation shows the sharper reversal. In 2000, 18.7% of urban residents and 9.2% of rural residents used safely managed sanitation. By 2024 the rural share had risen more than fourfold to 41.9%, while the urban share reached only 30.7%.⁷⁸ City dwellers are therefore now less likely than villagers to have a toilet whose waste is contained, emptied and treated.

The data do not explain this, and we do not attribute it to a single cause. One relevant fact is that 51.5% of Bangladesh’s urban population lived in slums in 2022, by a UN-Habitat-based estimate.⁹ Informal, crowded settlements are hard to connect to piped water and sewers, but the JMP series does not break services down by settlement type, so this is context rather than a demonstrated cause.

Real gains in hygiene and basic sanitation

None of this erases a large improvement. People using at least basic sanitation rose from 40.6% in 2010 to 67.6% in 2024, and the share with basic handwashing facilities, soap and water at home rose from 24.6% to 71.8%.¹⁰¹¹

The end of open defecation is perhaps the clearest public-health achievement in the series: 7.2% in 2010, 3.4% in 2015, 0.6% in 2019 and zero from 2020.² The JMP’s own caveat applies: “zero” in a modelled series means below the threshold of reliable measurement, not literally nobody.

Why the gap matters for health

Unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene kill mainly through diarrhoeal disease, intestinal worm infections and malnutrition. WHO’s estimate of the death rate attributable to them in Bangladesh was 18.2 per 100,000 population in 2019, the latest year available in the World Bank series.¹² That is a modelled estimate that predates recent progress, so it is a benchmark, not a current measure.

Even so, it is a reminder that “basic” services do not remove the risk. A household that has a tube well and a latrine can still drink contaminated water or live downstream of unmanaged waste. For a country that has already ended open defecation and nearly reached full basic water coverage, the next gains must come from quality, reliability and treatment — which are harder and costlier to deliver than access.

What it will take

The data point to where the shortfall is rather than prescribing the fix, so these are priorities for policy and further study:

• Measure quality, not just access. National targets and budgets should track safely managed services and publish results by district, so the roughly 40% gap can be split into distance, reliability and contamination.
• Treat faecal sludge in towns. With urban safely managed sanitation at 30.7%, emptying, transport and treatment services are the binding constraint, not latrine counts.
• Test and treat the water people actually drink. Routine household and source testing, with treatment or alternative sources where it fails, targets the chemical and faecal contamination that keep water from counting as safe.
• Close the urban lag. Dense towns and informal settlements need dedicated water and sanitation investment; rural-focused programmes were effective, but cities are now the weaker link.
• Keep hygiene momentum. Handwashing facilities have nearly tripled since 2010; maintaining supplies of soap and water in low-income households is cheap protection.