Southwest China's Yunnan Province has taken measures to provide clean and safe drinking water for more than 19.6 million rural residents over the past five years, the provincial government said Wednesday.

Since 2016, Yunnan has invested 11.9 billion yuan (about 1.8 billion U.S. dollars) in improving the quality of drinking water in rural areas, said Liu Gang, director of the Yunnan provincial water resources department.

In the past five years, local governments at various levels made great efforts to identify households that had trouble obtaining clean drinking water, upgrade the water-supply infrastructure and improve its management, making sure every villager had access to clean drinking water by 2020.