Many more people in India now have access to clean water. 81% of households in rural India now have tap water, compared to only 17% six years ago, DD News says.
In some countries, most people still lack access to clean water.
54% of people lack access to clean water in Africa’s second largest country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in Chad and Niger, two other large African countries.
Equatorial Guinea is an African country blessed with oil wealth, but it has a corrupt and brutal government, so 52% of its people lack access to clean water.
A majority of the people in Papua New Guinea in the south Pacific also lack access to clean water, even though Australia has provided lots of foreign aid to that country and it has mineral wealth.
But many more countries used to lack clean water for most of their people. That has changed a lot for the better over the last 15 years, and much of the world’s people have obtained access to clean water over the last generation.
Despite its poverty, Niger has made progress in public health and life expectancy. Niger recently became the first nation in Africa to eliminate river blindness, a disease spread by flies that breed near rivers. Those flies carry long thin parasitic worms that burrow in a victim’s skin.
In other good news. the southern African nation of Zambia used artificial intelligence to find more mineral wealth.
The African nation of Guinea recently eradicated sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease carried by the tsetse fly that causes irreversible brain damage, aggressiveness, psychosis, and then death, if left untreated.
Sexual harassment has become less prevalent in Pakistan, the world’s fifth most populous country, as sanitation has improved.
