How many people in West and Central Africa have safe drinking water at home? RFLD’s policy brief, Women, Water and Article 15 of the Maputo Protocol, uses the latest UN figures to answer. The numbers show a region far from the goal, with a deep divide between towns and villages.
The measure used
The figures come from the UN Statistical Yearbook, 68th issue, published in November 2025. Its source is the WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) database. The indicator is “safely managed” drinking water, the indicator for Sustainable Development Goal target 6.1, which aims for “universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all” by 2030.
The regional picture in 2024
Across sub-Saharan Africa, 31.7% of people used safely managed drinking water in 2024. In urban areas the figure was 51.6%. In rural areas it was 16.2%.
West Africa sits close to the regional average. In Western Africa, 30.6% of people used safely managed drinking water in 2024, with 40.6% in towns and 20.4% in rural areas.
Central Africa is further behind. In Middle Africa, only 17.7% of people had safely managed drinking water. The urban figure was 31.1%. The rural figure was 2.8%. In other words, fewer than 3 in every 100 rural residents of Central Africa have a safely managed supply.
Sanitation figures are lower still. Safely managed sanitation reached 26.0% in sub-Saharan Africa and 26.8% in Western Africa. In Middle Africa it was 15.6%.
The African Union’s own policy documents confirm the scale of the gap. The Africa Water Vision 2063 and Policy, endorsed by Heads of State in February 2026, states that “only about half of Africa’s population has access to safe water”. The African Union’s press release on its launch cites an annual investment gap of US$30 billion.
Country by country
The same UN table gives 2024 figures for safely managed drinking water in several countries of RFLD’s network:
- Ghana: 42.9%
- Côte d’Ivoire: 36.4%
- Nigeria: 29.9%
- Senegal: 27.2%
- Togo: 20.5%
- Benin: 17.7%
- Chad: 6.3%
The rural gaps are wide everywhere. In Benin, 28.4% of urban residents have safely managed water, against 6.7% in rural areas. In Senegal, the figures are 41.1% and 13.2%. In Ghana, 60.2% and 17.2%.
Why the rural gap is a women’s issue
Where water is not on the premises, someone has to fetch it. The JMP’s 2023 gender report found that in 7 out of 10 such households, women and girls aged 15 and over do this work. In sub-Saharan Africa, women are four times as likely as men to collect water.
So every percentage point of rural households without safe water translates into hours of women’s labour. The 2.8% figure for rural Middle Africa is a statistic about infrastructure. It is also a statistic about the daily lives of millions of women.
UN Women’s Gender Snapshot 2025 gives the global view. In 2024, “over 1 in every 4 women and girls lacked access to safely managed drinking water (26% or 1.1 billion)”.
The pace of change
Progress has been real but slow. Globally, coverage of safely managed drinking water rose from 68% in 2015 to 74% in 2024, according to the JMP. Coverage in fragile contexts is “38 percentage points lower” than elsewhere.
For Africa, the JMP’s 2022 special report warned that universal coverage by 2030 would require a “12-fold increase” in the pace of progress on safely managed drinking water. In rural Africa, 4 in 5 people lacked safely managed drinking water at that time.
Citizens notice. Afrobarometer’s Round 9 surveys, covering 39 countries, found that 56% of respondents had gone without enough clean water at least once in the past year. Only 38% approved of their government’s handling of water and sanitation.
From numbers to obligations
Article 15(a) of the Maputo Protocol obliges States Parties to “provide women with access to clean drinking water”. The 2024 figures show how far most countries in West and Central Africa remain from that standard, especially in rural areas.
RFLD’s brief asks States to report these figures to the African Commission in every periodic report, broken down by sex and by rural and urban area. It also asks them to publish water budgets that show who benefits. You can find more on each country’s legal commitments in RFLD’s country law profiles.
About the report
This article draws on RFLD’s report Women, Water and Article 15 of the Maputo Protocol, published on 4 October 2026. Read the summary, download the English edition or the French edition.
