Reading Passage 3

You should spend 20 minutes on questions 1-12, which are based on Reading Passage 3.

The Millennium Development Goals

The MDG drinking water target has been reached. Over 2 billion people gained access to improved water sources from 1990 to 2010, and the proportion of the global population still using unimproved sources is estimated at only 11 per cent. This is less than half of the 24 per cent estimated for 1990. Almost 6.1 billion people, 89 per cent of the world's population, were using an improved water source in 2010. The drinking water target has thus become one of the first MDG targets to be met.

While this tremendous achievement should be applauded, a great deal of work remains.

First, huge disparities exist. While coverage of improved water supply sources is 90 per cent or more in Latin America and the Caribbean, Northern Africa and large parts of Asia, it is only 61 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa. Coverage in the developing world overall stands at 86 per cent, but it is only 63 per cent in countries designated as 'least developed'. Similar disparities are found within countries -between the rich and poor and between those living in rural and urban areas.

Second, complete information about drinking water safety is not available for global monitoring. Systematically testing the microbial and chemical quality of water at the national level in all countries is prohibitively expensive and logistically complicated; therefore, a proxy indicator for water quality was agreed upon for MDG monitoring. This proxy measures the proportion of the population using 'improved' drinking water sources, defined as those that, by the nature of their construction, are protected from outside contamination. However, some of these sources may not be adequately maintained and therefore may not actually provide 'safe' drinking water. As a result, it is likely that the number of people using safe water supplies has been over-estimated.

Finally, more than 780 million people remain unserved. Although the MDG drinking water target has been met, it only calls for halving the proportion of people without safe drinking water. More than one tenth of the global population still relied on unimproved drinking water sources in 2010.

Assessing progress towards the MDG target alone creates an incomplete picture, since countries that started out with low baseline coverage have had to work much harder to halve the proportion of the population without water and sanitation. Added to this is the challenge of rapid population growth, which can easily mean that any gains in people served are overtaken by population growth. Moreover, it is the poorest countries that are often characterized by a combination of low baseline coverage and high population growth. This means that countries may be making significant progress in the absolute number of people served, but still be persistently 'off track'.

In response, the JMP* has developed an alternative indicator that represents the proportion of the current population that has gained access over the period from 1995 to the most recent update, in this case 2010. It is thus the percentage of people living in a country today who have gained access in the last 15 years.

This indicator can be used to assess a country's performance irrespective of whether it started out with high or low baseline coverage. The indicator is expressed as: the increase since 1995 in the number of people with access as a proportion of the current (2010) population.

The graph shows selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have performed above the regional average of nearly 26 per cent. Some countries have made remarkable progress in providing large proportions of their population with access to improved drinking water sources, and this is true even of countries that are off track in terms of MDG progress. Rwanda and Sierra Leone, for instance, both experienced conflict during the period 1995 to 2010, but have nevertheless shown greater progress than that suggested by the regional average. In Rwanda, more than 30 per cent of the population have gained access to improved drinking water sources since 1995; this represents over 3 million people. Even countries that have not reported such good progress are noteworthy in terms of the number of people served.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has provided improved water sources for only about 16 per cent of its population since 1995; still, this represents more than 10 million people. It is remarkable that sub-Saharan Africa has outstripped Eastern Asia in terms of the proportion of the current population that have gained access in the last 15 years.

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* JMP-Joint Monitoring Programme