Countries Where People Are Least Satisfied With Water Quality

Gallup’s conclusions are based on the following:

Satisfaction with the quality of the water in the city or area where they live remained relatively high for residents in most parts of the world in 2013. More than seven in 10 worldwide are content with the quality of their water — in line with what Gallup has measured since 2008. But satisfaction remains stubbornly low in sub-Saharan Africa, as the region attempts to meet the U.N.’s 2015 Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the number of people without access to improved drinking water sources.

The reason may not be of much comfort for people living in Congo (Kinshasa), where only 21% of those questioned were happy with the quality of their water and 78% where not. Among the 10 countries where dissatisfaction was highest were Haiti (28%), Egypt (37%), Angola (39%), Sierra Leone (40%), Congo Brazzaville (40%), Syria (41%), Tanzania (42%), Ukraine (43%) and Russia (44%).

At the other end of the spectrum, 98% of the people in Iceland were satisfied with their water quality. The other 10 nations at the top of the list were Sweden (97%), Finland (97%), Austria (95%), Denmark (95%), Germany (94%), Netherlands (94%), Australia (93%), United Kingdom (92%) and Canada (90%). Five are clustered together in Northern Europe.

The United States was nowhere near the top of the list, ranking 22nd with a satisfaction rate of 85%. That put it behind Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Myanmar, Paraguay and Nepal.

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Methodology: Results are based on telephone and face-to-face interviews with 1,000 adults, aged 15 and older, conducted in 138 countries in 2013. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error ranged from a low of ±2.1 percentage points to a high of ±5.6 percentage points. The margin of error reflects the influence of data weighting. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.