The United Nations and Global Issues: Water

11 per cent of the global population, remain without access to an improved source of drinking water. The United Nations has long been addressing the global crisis caused by insufficient water supply to satisfy basic human needs and growing demands on the world’s water resources to meet human, commercial and agricultural needs. The United Nations Water Conference (1977), the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981-1990), the International Conference on Water and the Environment (1992) and the Earth Summit (1992) — all focused on this vital resource. The Decade, in particular, helped some 1.3 billion people in developing countries gain access to safe drinking water. But the fact that there's still 11 percent of the global population that do not have access to safe drinking water is a major problem. Although the UN has increased access to drinking water in developing countries, but there's still a lot of social and health issues that need to be dealt with, like poverty, HIV, AIDS, malaria and other diseases, and as long as there's no upward mobility and these issues remain, things will only get worse. 

http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/water/