In Summary
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Mo Ali, Managing Director of the Liberia Water and Sewer Corporation, claimed on May 18 that 76% of Liberia’s population has access to basic water services.
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A review of data from the World Health Organization and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme found that about 79% of Liberians had access to basic water services in 2024.
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Based on the available evidence, the claim by Mo Ali is mostly correct, although newer data show that about 79% of the population has access to basic water services.
On May 18, the Managing Director of the Liberia Water and Sewer Corporation, Mo Ali, appeared on Spoon FM and made several claims about water and sanitation in Liberia while discussing progress and challenges at the corporation.
Key amongst the statements, Ali claimed that 76% of Liberia’s population now has access to a basic water supply.
The WHO and UNICEF define basic drinking water services as drinking water from an improved source, such as piped water, boreholes, protected wells, or springs, provided that the round-trip collection time is no more than 30 minutes.
The Claim
An excerpt of Ali’s claim reads: “Overall, in Liberia, 76% of the population has access to basic water supply.”
Rating Justification
To verify this claim, we reviewed the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply, Sanitation, and Hygiene.
The JMP is the official United Nations mechanism tasked with tracking global progress on WASH (Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene). It provides internationally comparable estimates to guide decision-makers, governments, and civil society toward achieving universal access.
According to the latest (2024) JMP data for Liberia, about 79% of the population has access to basic water services.
We also searched the UNICEF data and found that the proportion of the population using at least basic drinking water services in 2020 was 76%.
Additionally, we reviewed the 2022 National Housing and Population Census report published on the website of the Liberia Institute of Statistics and Geo-Information Services (LIGIS) – the official source of national statistics for Liberia.
Page 64 of the report reveals that 70% of the population has access to safe drinking water sources while 30% lacks safe drinking water.
Conclusion
Based on these findings, we conclude that the claim made by LWSC Managing Director Mo Ali that 76% of Liberia’s population has access to basic water services is mostly correct. The data he cited dates back to 2020.
According to the latest 2024 data from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme on water and sanitation, about 79% of Liberia’s population has access to basic water services.
