Why billions of folks can't easily get a drink or flush a toilet

Growing up, Amaka Godfrey remembers how much of her life revolved around water.

She'd have to lug a can of water to her primary school in Nigeria each day, which had no water of its own. Later, in boarding school, she'd chain a can of water to her bed each night to prevent classmates from stealing it.

A new report from the World Health Organization shows that Godfrey's experience is shared by many. One in four people lack access to safe drinking water, according the report.

That's over 2 billion people who aren't able to simply turn on the tap in their home, workplace or school and get a glass of water they know will be clean.

Even more people, 3.4 billion, aren't able to reliably use safe sanitation systems, like toilets with plumbing. About 354 million people worldwide have no toilet available and must defecate in the open, which can create health hazards, according to WHO.

People in low-income countries are more than twice as likely as those in richer ones to lack basic drinking water and sanitation services. That disparity can make it hard for people in wealthier countries to conceive of the challenges people face fulfilling these fundamental needs.

So NPR spoke with Amaka Godfrey, who is now the executive director of international programs at WaterAid, a non-profit, about what it's like growing up without easy access to safe water, what the new WHO report says about progress that's been made and how far the globe still has to go.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was it like to grow up without easy access to safe drinking water and sanitation?

I currently live in London, but I grew up in southeastern Nigeria.

At home, as a younger child I remember refusing to go to the toilet because it wasn't even a drop pit, it was a bucket toilet. All that I can remember is a room that smelled horribly and you could actually see human feces flowing out of the bucket with maggots everywhere. That's my earliest memory of what a sanitation system looked like. That's lived with me and defined me for life.

Then, my parents moved into an apartment, and we had a toilet, but the running water only came once in a while, so you didn't really flush every time you went. So when you finished washing clothes, you poured that water inside the toilet to flush it.

What about outside of your home? Did your school have clean water and sanitation?

My primary school did not have water at all. I didn't even know that schools had water, it wasn't something that occurred to me that you could go to school and get water. The toilet we had in school was a drop pit.

We used to be made to bring a five liter can to school, no matter how small you are, and I was very tiny, so I had to drag this five liter [roughly 1.3 gallons] can to school. Part of that provides drinking water for the teachers. It provides drinking water to the bucket in the classroom.

So there was a communal bucket of water for the whole classroom?

Yes. And we all had our plastic cups with our names on it. I remember them hanging on a pole. So when it was break time to have water, each of us goes and takes a cup and just dips it into that bucket of the classroom water.

Where did you get the water to bring?

I was amongst the privileged ones, because I was the child of a teacher and lived in a flat, I could bring water from home. But the majority of kids that I went to school with didn't live in places like that. So not only did they have to look for water to bring to school, but before they came to school they had to fetch water.

So you couldn't come to school without water. Where would kids get water, if not from home?

In some cases, their parents paid for them to buy it on the way, but in many cases they went to the stream. I vividly remember which stream, because it flowed into the big river Niger. So kids start off to school a bit earlier, take their empty cans and pass by the river to collect water. I can recollect that some kids from my school drowned, because when it's the rainy season, it [the stream] becomes quite large.

When I was older, I went to a boarding school. My God I still have nightmares from that toilet. The biggest punishment you would get is to clean the toilet, because it's basically scooping poop. It was a pit toilet, and you can imagine with a bunch of kids what the situation is. Water was usually limited, so there wasn't enough to really clean the toilet.

What would you do for drinking water at the boarding school?

Water was from the water supply authority, which would come and fill up big tanks at each dormitory. Everyone had a specific size of can, we called them jerry cans, that you fill for the week. Basically, stealing water from each other was a big deal, because not everyone always filled their jerry can. So you'd chain your can to your bed in a way that it cannot be poured by anyone. But it got to the stage where people started bringing pipes from home that you can suck water and transfer it from somebody's can to your can.

You eventually went to the United Kingdom for school. It must've been a shock to have instant water.

When I then came to study in England, and I went to my halls of residence, I was like, wow, there was water running. And I asked my tutor, or guardian for international students. I say, "Where can I buy a jerry can?" And he was confused. Even when I went to uni[versity] in Nigeria, it was the same. We didn't have water. You have to have jerry cans to store them. And after a while. He said, "Listen, you are in England now. You do not need to buy a jerry can. Anytime you want water, you open the tap, there will be water running."

The fact that I didn't have to fetch water as a student, it was a huge privilege. When I heard my fellow students who grew up in this culture complaining, I remember one day in class I got so mad. I got up and said, "Guys can you just shut up? Everyone in this country is so lazy. You wake up in the morning and don't have to do anything, you go and have a shower, a shower. You go to the toilet and flush it, and you don't have to go and fetch water."

The WHO report revealed that billions of people don't have that kind of experience, of being able to take clean drinking water and sanitation for granted. What did you make of the report's findings?

It's a good thing to have this data available and has helped us monitor progress.

I think it really highlights globally the plight, and how water and sanitation is interlinked with so many other things that the world is grappling with, including economic development, health, women safety, all of that. It helps put it on the agenda of the world.

But a good point to make is that progress has been made. We have not been static.

Yeah, the report says that since 2000 over 2.2 billion people have gained access to safe drinking water. Where do you see that progress?

Across many countries there have been so many projects to increase access. I was visiting a project area [for WaterAid in Ethiopia] where I had worked eight years ago. At that time, there was not a drop of water around that rural community. They'd go to streams, to dig near streams to get water. I go back and they have solar powered water systems, they have water coming from taps.

What accounts for that progress?

There has been a lot of advocacy and awareness creation that it's really critical for well being and economic development and health and poverty reduction. There's been more education, and more qualified people working in countries that can work with their community and government to make things better. And there's been advancements in technology for how we can access water. We now have solar powered water systems that can connect borehole wells.

And yet there's still billions of people who can't easily drink safe water or use clean sanitation. Where do you see the big gaps?

Rural areas are still lagging behind because it's a high cost to go find people miles and miles away. Urban areas have become stagnant. That's what the report is telling us.

The population of a lot of the places where access is still low are those that are increasing, almost tripling in population, especially in urban areas. It's difficult to keep up with a population that's growing that fast and settling in a place where the infrastructure was already weak. The replacement of this infrastructure isn't keeping up with population growth, and the global economic downturn is affecting that.

What needs to be done to close those gaps and make progress?

The investment needs to almost kind of quadruple, because we're chasing a population that is growing so fast.

Younger people are making the majority of our population, therefore we need to harness what they bring, and have that awareness in them on the link between water and sanitation and wider development goals. If we want to achieve what we want to achieve, we need to make sure that these fundamentals are there. Hopefully I'll be watching from the side as a very old African lady.