Find what works for cleaner water, anywhere.
ActSmall · Water is a free, map-first water-quality portal. The map opens on a place that needs help right now — and shows you, as a normal citizen, exactly what you can do about it. Tap any country to see live conditions, ranked open-source treatment techniques, and curated citizen actions. No accounts. No tracking. Nothing for sale.
Information only.
This site is not drinking-water certification, engineering certification, or medical advice. For drinking water or any incident, ask qualified local people. Get help →
What the map shows
Drinking-water access (JMP)
Country shading from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme — the share of people without safely managed drinking water.
Freshwater stress (SDG 6.4.2)
FAO AQUASTAT / UN-Water indicator: withdrawals as a share of available renewable water resources.
Disaster alerts (GDACS)
Floods, droughts, and tropical cyclones from the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System — refreshed daily.
Real-time water-quality gauges
Where a national agency publishes a high-frequency open-data gauge network, the map surfaces it — today every USGS NWIS site (United States) that reported pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, conductance, or temperature in the last hour. Equivalent EU EIONET, UK Environment Agency, and Brazilian ANA feeds are on the open backlog — submit one for a country we are missing.
Public drinking-water taps (OSM)
Crowd-sourced taps from OpenStreetMap, on demand for the area you’re looking at. Save any of them as one of your own pins.
Your own pins
Annotate wells, springs, taps, hazards, or anything else worth tracking — saved only in your browser. Export to back up or share by file.
What works here?
Click any country and the recommender ranks an open catalog of 24 community- and household-scale techniques by how well they fit your local situation:
Filtration
Biosand, slow-sand, ceramic-pot, gravity-fed ultrafiltration, riverbank filtration.
Disinfection
SODIS (solar UV), boiling, chlorine tablets, solar UV-LED.
Capture & storage
Rainwater harvesting with first-flush diverters, sand dams, fog harvesting, managed aquifer recharge.
Reuse & sanitation
Greywater reuse, EcoSan / urine-diverting dry toilets.
Specific contaminants
SONO (arsenic), aerated sand filter (iron), bone-char (fluoride), Moringa coagulation (turbidity).
Pre-treatment & ecology
Constructed wetlands, mycelium beds for organic load — one technique among many in the catalog.
Every technique links to its primary open-access reference (CAWST, Eawag/Sandec, SSWM, WHO, EPA, IRC…). Nothing on this site is for sale.
From recognition to action, in one click
Most public-good information sites tell you a problem exists and stop there. We try to help you take the next step. Click into any country and the map picks the single highest-leverage thing you can do for it right now, based on the live data:
See the active emergency response
If an IFRC emergency operation is currently running in the country, the headline action surfaces it — with the live appeal name and the days the operation has been active — so you can read the situation report straight from the operator. Whether you do anything beyond reading is your call, not ours.
Find vetted long-running operators
If the country has a chronic drinking-water gap, the recommender names long-running operators (WaterAid, charity: water) so you know who already does the work. We surface the names; we do not nudge you toward an outcome.
Cut your own water use
If withdrawal stress is severe today or projected to worsen, the action shifts to conservation — one household leak fix this week is the cheapest verb on the list.
Volunteer from your laptop
If a water-related disaster is reported nearby but no IFRC appeal is open yet, the action points at Humanitarian OpenStreetMap — trace buildings & roads aid teams use within hours.
Email a representative
Every primary action carries a one-click Email an MP / representative button with the country, the actual data point, and a short civil ask already written. You only have to pick the recipient and press send.
Tell two people
If nothing acute is signalled, the action becomes multiplication: forward the live view to two more people via your phone’s share sheet (or a pre-filled email). The headline number travels with the link.
Below every primary action sit three small affordances: Mark done writes a private entry to your own action log so a one-shot intent becomes a habit you can see; 30-day reminder downloads a calendar event so the commitment outlives the moment; Tell two people uses your share sheet so reach multiplies without friction. The log lives only in your browser. Nothing is tracked, gamified, or sent anywhere.
How the data stays current
A small scheduled job pulls public feeds once a day (GDACS, USGS NWIS, the WHO/UNICEF and FAO indicators on Our World in Data), normalizes each one, and serves the result to everyone who visits. Your browser only ever talks to our own server for the data layers. Result: same-day freshness, deliberately tiny running costs, and no upstream API gets polled more than its publication rhythm warrants.
Read more in methodology. Source code lives publicly — everything you see can be inspected.