World Bank Group Launches Water Forward Coalition to Boost Water Security for One Billion People by 2030

New global initiative brings together governments, development banks, private sector and philanthropies around government-led “Water Compacts” to accelerate water investment and reform

The World Bank Group has announced its support for Water Forward, a new global coalition aiming to improve water security for up to one billion people by 2030 through coordinated investment, policy reform, and delivery support.

The Scale of the Global Water Challenge

Water security has become an increasingly urgent global priority, as climate change, population growth, and rising demand for water across agriculture, industry, and household use place mounting pressure on already strained water systems worldwide. Despite decades of investment in water infrastructure and policy reform, hundreds of millions of people continue to lack reliable access to safe water, while agricultural water management systems in many regions remain poorly equipped to meet the demands of a growing global population.

This challenge is particularly acute in the context of global food security. According to the coalition, current agricultural water management practices would leave around 6.5 billion people unable to be fed sustainably by 2050 — a projection that underscores the scale of reform needed within global agri-water systems if food production is to keep pace with population growth without further depleting already stressed water resources.

It is against this backdrop that the World Bank Group and a broad coalition of partners have moved to launch Water Forward, positioning the initiative as a coordinated response to a challenge that has historically been addressed through fragmented, individually funded projects rather than a unified global strategy.

Coalition Structure and Membership

Water Forward brings together a wide range of stakeholders, including national governments, multilateral development banks, private sector companies, and philanthropic organizations. This multi-stakeholder structure reflects a deliberate strategy to align the technical expertise, financing capacity, and implementation reach of different types of institutions behind a shared set of water security goals.

The coalition explicitly seeks to position water not merely as a resource requiring protection, but as a driver of jobs, economic growth, and resilience — a framing intended to strengthen the case for water investment among stakeholders who might otherwise view it primarily as a cost center rather than an economic opportunity.

The World Bank Group’s Contribution

The World Bank Group is supporting Water Forward through its own Water Strategy Implementation Plan, which includes a specific target of improving water security for 400 million people by 2030 — a substantial subset of the coalition’s broader one-billion-person goal, and one that reflects the World Bank’s role as one of the initiative’s central institutional backers.

Three Structural Pillars

Water Forward is organized around three core pillars: Water for People, Water for Food, and Water for Planet. This three-part structure is designed to ensure that the coalition’s work addresses water security across its major dimensions simultaneously, rather than focusing narrowly on any single use case such as drinking water access or agricultural irrigation alone.

Through this structure, the coalition aims to make water systems more investable, scalable, and sustainable — language that signals an emphasis on attracting private capital and long-term financing into water infrastructure projects, in addition to traditional public and development finance sources.

The “Water Compact” Model

Central to Water Forward’s operational approach is its coalition model, which is designed to align partners behind government-led “Water Compacts.” These compacts are intended to combine policy reforms, financing commitments, and implementation support into unified national or regional frameworks, allowing coordinated action to be delivered at a larger scale than would typically be achievable through individual, standalone projects.

This compact-based approach reflects a broader trend in international development finance toward country-owned, government-led reform frameworks, which are often viewed as more likely to produce durable results than externally driven projects, since they require host governments to commit directly to the policy and institutional reforms needed to sustain improvements over the long term.

Why This Matters

By combining a large-scale, time-bound target with a structured, government-led delivery model, Water Forward represents a significant new entrant into the global water security landscape — one that explicitly seeks to bridge the gap between the scale of global water challenges and the historically fragmented nature of international water investment. Its success will likely depend heavily on the extent to which governments are willing and able to commit to the reforms required under individual Water Compacts, as well as the coalition’s ability to mobilize sustained financing from its diverse group of institutional partners through 2030 and beyond.