The state of water and sanitation in MexicoT

• Half of Mexico's 120 million people do not have reliable access to safely managed drinking water or sanitation.
• Even for households that do have existing piped services, water quality remains low, with tap water not safe for drinking in many areas.
• Service reliability is a constant challenge, with water often flowing only a few times each week in many areas.
• Mexico is experiencing its worst drought in three decades, depleting the main water sources for millions of families. In Guadalajara, the second largest metropolitan area in Mexico, 500,000 people have been without any water since March 2021.

Overview of the need

Mexico is currently experiencing its worst draught in three decades. Water access is a critical problem in parts of Mexico. Decreasing water resources and growing demand is resulting in the deterioration of water quality and quantity for vast, mainly low-income populations. About ten million people in Mexico now have no water services reaching their homes at all, with small, rural, and indigenous communities starkly overrepresented. In larger towns and cities, the trend is a widening gap between demand and supply, punctuated by increasingly frequent, acute episodes of extreme shortage.

The simultaneous water crises seen in Mexico City and Guadalajara this year are clear examples of this tendency, with Mexico City’s reservoirs at historic lows, and one of Guadalajara’s principal reservoirs falling to below-useable levels, which resulted in some 500,000 people there being left entirely without grid water for four months in the spring of 2021. These trends are driven by the deep depletion of underground and surface water resources and complicated by dysfunctional governance. They are likely to prove very difficult to reverse in the short term, and they are happening all over Mexico.

The result from this situation is the emergence of huge areas in which the population faces impoverished and decreasing access to water. Where decades ago, people expected to see urban public water services improve over time, they now line up for water from trucks, in neighborhoods that until recently had received their water from a tap. It is a slow-motion crisis that is leaving millions increasingly vulnerable and subject to being suddenly left without water.