For more than 2 billion people around the world, turning on a tap and getting clean water isn’t an option.
Many walk miles to collect it from ponds, rivers or makeshift hose points – water that can carry disease and shorten lives. But a sweeping new initiative backed by the World Bank wants to change that – and fast.
The programme is called Water Forward, and its ambition is enormous: secure water access for a billion people within four years, according to a Reuters report.
Launched on April 15, it brings together the World Bank and some of the biggest development lenders on the planet – the European Investment Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the New Development Bank, which was established by BRICS nations Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It’s the kind of coalition that rarely lines up behind a single cause.
“Water is foundational to how economies function,” World Bank head Ajay Banga said in a statement, adding that the task was now to “deliver reliable water services at scale.”
The scale of the problem is hard to overstate. Global demand for freshwater is expected to outstrip supply by up to 40% by the end of the decade, according to World Bank estimates. That’s not some far-off projection – it’s this decade.
And the damage is already showing. Water-related shocks are costing some countries several percentage points of annual economic growth, while climate change is intensifying both droughts and floods, squeezing public budgets and hitting vulnerable communities hardest, particularly in fast-growing cities.
A report last year put the human cost into even sharper focus: more than 2.1 billion people lack safe drinking water, and more than 3.4 billion – nearly half the world’s population – live without adequate sanitation.
So what will Water Forward actually do? For starters, it’s zeroing in on 14 countries in the most water-stressed regions of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. The priority is practical: fixing leaky urban water systems, modernizing irrigation, improving wastewater reuse and expanding data-driven planning. Think less about grand ribbon-cutting ceremonies, more about pipes that don’t lose half their water before it reaches a home.
The programme also takes aim at one of the root causes of the crisis. The World Bank estimates that 4 billion people experience water scarcity due to a mix of unclear government policies, weak regulations and financially unsustainable utilities. Water Forward plans to mobilize private capital and philanthropic money alongside public funding, while pushing governments to treat water as a strategic economic resource rather than a cheap public utility that can be ignored until the wells run dry.
The World Bank itself has committed to delivering water security to 400 million people by 2030. Partner commitments are expected to push the programme’s total reach past the billion mark.
It’s a target that would have seemed wildly optimistic a few years ago. But with freshwater supplies shrinking and billions of people still drinking from unsafe sources every single day, the coalition behind Water Forward is betting that the cost of doing nothing is far higher than the cost of acting now.
