Water supply and sanitation in Yemen are characterized by multiple challenges as well as some achievements. A key challenge is severe water scarcity, especially in the Highlands, prompting The Times of London to write "Yemen could become the first nation to run out of water". A second major obstacle is a high level of poverty, making it very difficult to recover the costs of service provision and infrastructure maintenance. Access to baseline water supply and sanitation in Yemen is as low as, or even lower than that in many sub-Saharan African countries. Yemen is both the poorest country and the most water-scarce country in the Arab world. Third, the capacity of sector institutions to plan, build, operate and maintain infrastructure is severely limited. Finally, the ongoing conflicts and instability make it even harder to improve or even maintain existing levels of service. The average Yemeni has access to only 80 to 86 cubic meters of water per year (58-62 gallons per day) for all uses, far below the internationally defined threshold for absolute water scarcity of 500 cubic meters per year, and much lower than the Middle Eastern regional average. Yemen's groundwater is the main source of water in the country, but the water tables have been severely depleted, leaving the country without a viable source of water. In the critical highland basins, including Sana'a and Taiz, the natural water tables are dropping by 1 to 8 meters each year. This has forced public and private well-drilling to reach deep fossil aquifers at excavation depths exceeding 1,000 meters in some areas. The groundwater has not been regulated effectively by Yemen's governments. Even before the conflicts, Yemen's water conditions were described as increasingly dire by experts, who worried that Yemen would be the "first country to run out of water". Agriculture in Yemen takes up about 90% of water in Yemen even though it only generates 6% of the nation's GDP. However, a large portion of Yemenis are dependent on small-scale subsistence farming. About half of agricultural water in Yemen is used to grow khat, a psychoactive plant that most Yemenis chew. This means that in such a water-scarce country as Yemen, where half the population is food-insecure, 45% of the water withdrawn from the ever-depleting aquifers is used to grow a narcotic crop rather than addressing widespread food insecurity. Following the 2015 Yemeni Civil War, the water shortage situation became increasingly dire, causing a widespread humanitarian and public health crisis. Between 14.4 million and 17.8 million people—about half of whom are children—struggle to access safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services. Fighting has forced millions of internally displaced Yemenis to relocated. Consequentially, wells in these areas went under increasing pressure. Additionally, water infrastructures, including municipal pipelines and coastal desalination plants, were targeted during the conflict. For example, on January 8, 2016, a major desalination plant in the city of Mokha was destroyed by a Saudi bomb, which caused the disruption of water supply not only in Mokha but also in Taiz. Centralized power grid failures and the high cost of fuel have heavily damaged public pumping stations, forcing more than 70% of the population to rely entirely on expensive, unregulated private water markets and mobile water tankers. Additionally, global warming and human overpopulation have also been contributing to the destruction of Yemen's water supply. This persistent lack of clean drinking water and functional sanitation utilities directly triggered serious public health emergencies, including historically severe outbreaks of cholera and waterborne illnesses. Over 2000 people died from the highly contagious bacterial infection in the four months from April to August 2017. To prevent a total cessation of public networks, international aid operations have managed to partially bypass the collapsed grid by transitioning urban and rural pumping stations to decentralized solar energy systems.
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