About Empty Glass

The Empty Glass is an interactive experience that shows access to clean drinking water through a simple everyday object, a glass.

Select a country and watch the glass fill according to the percentage of people who have access to safely managed drinking water. In many places, the glass never fills completely.

By translating statistics into a familiar physical form, the project makes global water inequality easier to understand without relying on complex charts or reports.

The experience was launched around World Water Day to encourage reflection on how something as basic as safe water remains unevenly distributed across the world.

Data is based on official estimates from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (JMP) and population figures from the World Bank. Values update as new data becomes available.