We drink it every day. It is the primary necessity for our bodies to function. We use it to clean our houses and ourselves. And yet, it is not accessible to everyone: water. One in four people around the world doesn’t have access toclean water, according to the World Health Organization. It is such a basic necessity, yet it remains out of reach for 2.1 billion people globally.
Unfortunately, this scarcity is a result of the greed of large corporations that violate the universal human right to access water for their own profit, harming both people and the environment. Nestlé is one of the corporations with the most significant documented negative impact on water management
For this year’s World Water Day, get involved in local and global campaigns to help us show that we really care about people and their right to clean, accessible water.
World Water Day 2026: billions are still missing clean water
Years pass by, but water remains inaccessible for many people around the world. According to the World Health Organization, the lack of safe tap water worldwide leaves 2.1 billion people without access to safely managed drinking water. As a result, 1.7 billion people lack basic hygiene and sanitation services at home.
This year’s World Water Day theme focuses on gender equality, in an effort to raise awareness on the additional challenges of being a woman in these problematic situations. According to the WHO, the lack of clean water doesn’t affect everyone in the same way. Girls and women are disproportionately impacted by the lack of clean water due to entrenched gender roles, inadequate infrastructure, underrepresentation, limited funding, restrictive social norms, and systemic inequalities.
This year’s events are going to focus on including women in water governance, services, and decision-making, because we must work together to ensure everyone has access to safe drinking water.
While the lack of safe drinking water is caused by various factors, including inadequate infrastructure, pollution, poverty, and climate-driven water scarcity, there is one particularly unethical factor that we will highlight today: Nestlé.
Greedy minds, big wallets: Nestlé’s exploitation of water resources
Yes, Nestlé has a part in all of this – and it shouldn’t come as a shock. Nestlé has been extracting and depleting the precious groundwater supplies of communities around the world for years. They have been snatching clean water from the hands of communities across the Americas, Asia and Africa, only to ‘sell’ them the fake reality of their ‘Pure life’ water for decades.
Basically a criminal act that is still unpunished and unnoticed by many people to this day. It started as a greedy act but quickly became a human rights and a climate issue. One corporation can do all this damage alone: let’s reflect on that.
No one is safe: Nestlé’s shady business hits everybody
As we already mentioned, this is not new. Just like WorldCrunch reported back in 2012, communities and villages have been left without water to serve Nestlé’s avaricious, money-grabbing business.
WorldCrunch reported on the village of Bhati Dilwan, in Pakistan, where Nestlé dug a deep well that has been depriving locals of portable drinking water, telling them that their ‘Pure life’ bottled water is the answer. Nestlé is also not the only one profiting from natural water resources on Indigenous land. Danone and Coca-Cola did it too, but Nestlé posed itself as a problem solver, as a saviour of these communities and the world’s water problems.
Entire Indigenous communities in North America have never had drinkable running tap water because of Nestlé. This happens, for example, in Ontario, Canada, where Native peoples cannot access the water from Six Nations treaty land. The company has continuously extracted water from their land, leaving them with no running water since their houses are not connected to a water treatment plant. For them, there is no other choice but to drive to a public tap to fill up as many jugs as possible and then boil that water to clean their houses and themselves. This doesn’t make the water drinkable though, they still have to buy bottled water in the nearest city. Nestlé has been taking advantage of the land ownership’s legal ambiguity to extract water for “free” from the Six Nations’ reserve – they only pay the State of Ontario, not the reserve. They are basically profiting from Indigenous lands, without paying them anything, only to sell them back their own water bottled up in stores.
So, Indigenous people have had access only to non-drinkable water after Nestlé decided to take ownership of their water resources since the early 2000s – all while presenting itself as a saviour. Families in Sub-Saharan Africa have to spend half their money on bottled water, while Indigenous communities in North America have to fight Nestlé over its – apparently legal, but environmentally and socially destructive – large-scale water extraction operations.
How much more will Nestlé be allowed to do while devastating communities and territories? What will be the total cost of these money-greedy, profit-driven actions by this company?
What we need from policymakers
World organizations and policymakers allow this to happen. They allow these greedy transnational corporations to influence public policy, leaving them with all the freedom they need to exploit our world’s natural resources for their own profit. What we need from organizations like the WHO or UNESCO is clear action towards crises like these, which directly affect billions of people every day.
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