WHO Unveils Water, Sanitation, Hygiene and Waste Strategy 2026–2035

The World Health Organization has released a new 10-year strategy setting out how it will strengthen its contribution to global health through water, sanitation, hygiene and waste action, as unsafe WASH conditions continue to drive at least 1.4 million preventable deaths each year.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has developed its Water, Sanitation, Hygiene (WASH) and Waste Strategy 2026–2035, outlining how the organization will strengthen its contribution to improving global health through WASH action, both within WHO and across its wider network of partners. The strategy’s stated vision is to substantially improve health through the safe management of water, sanitation and hygiene services in all settings.

A Decade-Defining Health Challenge

Water, sanitation and hygiene sit at the foundation of public health, underpinning everything from infectious disease prevention to maternal and child health outcomes. Yet despite decades of global investment, unsafe WASH conditions remain one of the leading preventable contributors to death and illness worldwide, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where infrastructure gaps, weak regulation, and limited monitoring capacity persist.

WHO’s new strategy succeeds its previous WASH strategy, which covered the 2018–2025 period, and was formally released in February 2026 as an institutional roadmap guiding the organization’s work over the coming decade. According to reporting from the Water Diplomat, the updated strategy represents a significant shift from its predecessor, establishing a common framework for priorities and results across WHO’s headquarters, regional offices, and country-level operations. It is designed to provide policy coherence across a wide range of interconnected health programs, including primary health care, infection prevention and control, antimicrobial resistance, environmental health, climate and health, and emergency preparedness and response.

The timing of the strategy reflects a changed global context. Since WHO’s previous WASH strategy was published in 2018, the operating environment for water and sanitation systems has shifted considerably, with climate change, disease outbreaks, population displacement and aging infrastructure all placing additional strain on already-stretched systems, according to reporting from Smart Water Magazine.

The Scale of the Global WASH Gap

The numbers underlying the new strategy illustrate the scale of the challenge WHO is attempting to address. Unsafe WASH conditions still contribute to at least 1.4 million preventable deaths annually. Despite measurable progress since 2015, an estimated 2.1 billion people globally still lack access to safely managed drinking water, including 106 million people who drink directly from untreated surface water sources such as rivers, lakes and ponds.

The sanitation gap is even larger: roughly 3.4 billion people worldwide still lack access to safely managed sanitation services, including 354 million people who practice open defecation. These figures underscore that while global development efforts have made incremental gains over the past decade, progress has fallen well short of what is needed to achieve universal, safely managed WASH access.

A Strategy Grounded in Evidence and Institutional Strengthening

The new strategy is built around a set of guiding principles that prioritize public-health impact, scientific evidence, institutional strengthening, and inclusive, sustainable implementation. At its core, the strategy focuses WHO’s efforts on interventions that deliver the greatest measurable health benefits, while leaning into the organization’s comparative advantage as a global provider of norms, evidence, and technical guidance rather than direct infrastructure delivery.

This includes a stronger emphasis on governance, regulation and risk management alongside continued investment in physical infrastructure. Reporting from Smart Water Magazine notes that the strategy argues future progress will depend not only on building and upgrading water and sanitation infrastructure, but on how those assets are planned, operated, monitored and protected across their full life cycle — a notable shift toward long-term systems thinking rather than one-off infrastructure projects.

Aligning With Global Development Goals

A central aim of the strategy is to reinforce and strengthen WHO’s relationships with WASH partners across the international development landscape, while mobilizing greater investment in the sector. The strategy places particular emphasis on strengthening alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN System-wide Strategy for Water and Sanitation, and relevant regional policy frameworks, aiming to build on synergies between the SDGs, public health, and WASH programming more broadly.

This alignment matters because progress on WASH-related SDG targets — including SDG 6, which covers clean water and sanitation — has lagged behind the pace needed to meet 2030 targets. By positioning itself as a technical convener and standard-setter, WHO aims to help translate high-level global commitments into coordinated, on-the-ground action across health systems, governments and international partners.

Addressing Coordinated Global Action

WHO officials have framed the strategy as a response to the need for coordinated global action to close persistent WASH gaps. By setting evidence-based norms and standards, strengthening regulatory and monitoring systems, and supporting countries in embedding WASH considerations into national health policy and service delivery, the organization aims to help translate proven interventions into sustained, measurable impact over the next decade.

The full strategy document, published by WHO’s Environment, Climate Change, One Health, Migration (ECO) team within its Water, Sanitation, Hygiene and Health (WSH) unit, runs 45 pages and outlines detailed strategic results areas covering drinking-water quality, safe sanitation and wastewater management, among other technical priorities.

The complete “WHO water, sanitation, hygiene and waste strategy 2026–2035” document is available for download through WHO’s official publications platform.

Download the “WHO water, sanitation, hygiene and waste strategy 2026–2035” here.

Source: World Health Organization (WHO); UN-Water; the Water Diplomat; Smart Water Magazine.