Faulty policies and vested market interests have conspired to deny the poor access to safe drinking water. The poor very often pay more for water than the rich through informal, often unsafe, supplies. For example, in Nairobi, Kenya, residents of informal settlements pay water vendors 5 to 10 times more per unit of water than what other residents pay to the city authorities. This is a common pattern in many cities in developing countries.
The Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development includes a commitment "to build a humane, equitable and caring global society cognisant of the need for human dignity for all". The global community committed itself to halve by 2015 the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water. According to the World Health Organisation and UNICEF in the "Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report", just 82 per cent of the population of the world have clean drinking water.