Whole Life / Study 01 · Essentials

The things we need, together.

Four access rates. One harder question: how many people could have all four?

Read the method
Try a different pattern
The population fabric

Sri Lanka

01 — 100
Select a tile to inspect its constructed access pattern.

100 tiles · one percentage point each · constructed possibilities, not surveyed people. Split tiles preserve fractional percentages.

Service marks, left to right: water · sanitation · electricity · cooking.

All selected servicesSome or noneSplit share

What the source data tell us

Choose the services that must be present together.

Required essential services
Could have all four
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Loading captured source observations…

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A logical range, conditional on compatible population estimates. Why a range?

Explore the missing overlap

Move the arrangement. Keep every access rate unchanged.

Every position is feasible under the stated marginal assumptions. The middle is not an estimate of the truth.

Read the gap

An average cannot tell us who has everything.

The tiles show two extreme ways the same national rates could overlap, and mixtures between them. They illustrate what is possible; they do not reconstruct the people behind the statistics.

Compare the possible ranges

Same year and selected services. Overlapping ranges leave the ordering unresolved. Source uncertainty is additional.

Evidence & interpretation

Useful limits. Visible assumptions.

Whole Life begins with access to essentials. It is not yet a measure of a complete decent life: housing, safety, financial resilience and quality of services are outside this first study.

How the overlap range is calculated

For k selected services with access fractions p₁ … pₖ, the fraction with all selected services lies between:

max(0, p₁ + … + pₖ − k + 1) ≤ P(all) ≤ min(p₁ … pₖ)

These established Fréchet bounds are attainable: a nested arrangement of access reaches the upper endpoint; spreading the missing-service shares around a unit circle reaches the lower endpoint. A mixture preserves each marginal rate and fills the interval. No independence assumption is made.

What the tiles do and do not represent

Each tile is a display unit for one percentage point, not a sampled person. Service marks show a constructed access combination. When a tile straddles combinations, its background is split in proportion to their shares. The exact calculations use unrounded source values; displayed labels round to one decimal.

Only selected services enter the construction. A deselected service is not inferred to be present or absent. With one service, the interval collapses to its reported rate. The slider is a position between feasible endpoints, not a probability, forecast, intervention or confidence level.

Comparability, source periods and uncertainty

All selected observations must exist in the same reference year for the same economy. We do not mix latest observations from different years or replace missing values with zero. The estimates refer to total population, treated as a common population for this conditional exercise. Provider surveys, models, reference frames and rounding can differ: a common year does not certify jointly harmonised observations.

The interval reflects missing overlap information only. Sampling error, model error, source revisions and comparability uncertainty are not included. Even a zero-width interval is not proof of exact real-world coverage. The country set is the 197-economy atlas cohort, not every territory in the world.

Four source definitions

  1. Basic water. Use of an improved drinking-water source with collection taking no more than 30 minutes for a round trip. This is not safely managed drinking water. SH.H2O.BASW.ZS ↗
  2. Basic sanitation. Use of improved sanitation facilities that are not shared with other households. This does not establish safe treatment of waste. SH.STA.BASS.ZS ↗
  3. Electricity. Population access to electricity. Access does not establish reliability, affordability or sufficient power for cooking. EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS ↗
  4. Clean cooking. Primary reliance on clean fuels and technologies for cooking, under the source definition. This is separate from having electricity. EG.CFT.ACCS.ZS ↗

Captured source release: 2026-11-02-r3. This explorer: Whole Life Essentials v1, published 4 November 2026. Source years are shown separately.

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