Data
People not using safely managed sanitation facilities
What you should know about this indicator
- Having access to safe and comfortable sanitation facilities is essential to a healthy and dignified life. Improved sanitation facilities help prevent the spread of diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid by providing safe separation from human waste.
- Unimproved sanitation facilities include pit latrines without a slab or platform, hanging latrines or bucket latrines.
- Unimproved sanitation facilities are more likely to be contaminated and pose a higher risk to health.
- Safely managed sanitation services are defined as improved sanitation facilities that are not shared with other households and where excreta are safely disposed in situ or transported and treated off-site.
- This data is provided by the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (JMP). They compile data from nationally representative household surveys and censuses, administrative data and service provider data. To learn more, see the JMP Methodology.
- This data reflects actual service use, which is directly linked to health outcomes and can be consistently measured across countries using household surveys. It is possible to theoretically have access to some kind of water and sanitation infrastructure, but not use them for daily needs. Therefore we refer to "use" or "using" rather than "access" to better reflect the underlying data.
People not using safely managed sanitation facilities
People not using safely managed sanitation services might practice open defecation, use unimproved sanitation facilities, or use improved facilities that do not safely manage human waste.
Source
WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (2025) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
December 8, 2025
Next expected update
December 2027
Date range
2000–2024
Unit
people
Related research and writing
What you should know about this indicator
- Having access to safe and comfortable sanitation facilities is essential to a healthy and dignified life. Improved sanitation facilities help prevent the spread of diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid by providing safe separation from human waste.
- Unimproved sanitation facilities include pit latrines without a slab or platform, hanging latrines or bucket latrines.
- Unimproved sanitation facilities are more likely to be contaminated and pose a higher risk to health.
- Safely managed sanitation services are defined as improved sanitation facilities that are not shared with other households and where excreta are safely disposed in situ or transported and treated off-site.
- This data is provided by the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (JMP). They compile data from nationally representative household surveys and censuses, administrative data and service provider data. To learn more, see the JMP Methodology.
- This data reflects actual service use, which is directly linked to health outcomes and can be consistently measured across countries using household surveys. It is possible to theoretically have access to some kind of water and sanitation infrastructure, but not use them for daily needs. Therefore we refer to "use" or "using" rather than "access" to better reflect the underlying data.
People not using safely managed sanitation facilities
People not using safely managed sanitation services might practice open defecation, use unimproved sanitation facilities, or use improved facilities that do not safely manage human waste.
Source
WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (2025) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
December 8, 2025
Next expected update
December 2027
Date range
2000–2024
Unit
people
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
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All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: People not using safely managed sanitation facilities”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Fiona Spooner, and Max Roser (2021) - “Clean Water and Sanitation”. Data adapted from World Health Organization/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260109-172523/grapher/safe-sanitation-without.html [online resource] (archived on January 9, 2026).How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (2025) – processed by Our World in DataFull citation
WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (2025) – processed by Our World in Data. “People not using safely managed sanitation facilities” [dataset]. World Health Organization/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene, “WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (JMP) 2000-2024 report” [original data]. Retrieved January 11, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260109-172523/grapher/safe-sanitation-without.html (archived on January 9, 2026).