Water resources, health ministers sign pact to end open defecation in Nigeria

By YANGE IKYAA

The minister of water resources, Sulieman Adamu, has signed an MoU with Dr. Osagie Ehanire, who is Nigeria’s minister of health towards a collaborative programme for Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) in federal health insituitions across the country.

The signing took place at the conference room of the federal ministry of water resources in Abuja on March 13, 2023.

Speaking at the event, Adamu noted that the WASH Poverty Diagnostic Report released in 2017, showed the deplorable state of WASH services in the country and the urgent need to change the narrative.

The report, which was released in the earlier years of the Buhari-led administration, triggered many subsequent sectorial interventions to address the national shortcoming.

Some of these initiatives include the development of the National Action Plan for the Revalitization of the Wash Sector, the Presidential Declaration of State of Emergency on the Sector, the Partnership for Expanded Programme on WASH ( PEWASH), the Institutionalization of the Wash National Routine Outcome Mapping ( WASHNORM), the Clean Nigeria: Use the Toilet Campaign, the Sustainable Urban and Rural Wash (SURWASH) Programme, and the Development of Road Map for Hand Hygeine for All, among others.

Speaking further, the water resources minister noted that these high level initiatives clearly demonstrate the strong will of the federal government towards reversing the narrative on Nigeria’s poor WASH indices.

The annual WASHNORM survey enables the measurement of progress towards meeting the SDG targets. It has determined that primary healthcare facilities and those located in rural areas are more disavantaged than secondary healthcare facilities and those located in urban centres.

The Health WASH Programme, which is the basis of the MoU, is designed to identify the WASH needs and bridge the WASH services gap across healthcare facilities in Nigeria, with focus on primary healthcare facilities.

According to him, the HEALTH WASH programme is expected to serve as a catalyst to spur investment in healthcare facilities, leading to universal wash coverage in healthcare centers. The MoU details the obligation of the parties, the frameworks for the programme coordination, delivery as well as financing, monitoring and evaluation.

Adamu emphasised that the MoU is being bequeathed to the next administration to sustain the progress done in the WASH sector and to meet international and local obligations.

Similarly, the minister of health, Osagie Ehanire, stressed the overall importance of Health WASH in the health sector. According to him, 60 per cent of infant mortality is attributed to diarrhoea and malaria, which has to do with poor sanitation, poor quality of water and stagnant dirty water.

With the signing of the the Health WASH programme by the two ministries, the hope is to have a beter ranking at the global scale and provide potable, usable water in the primary healthcare centres across Nigeria.

The permanent secretary in the ministry of water resources, Mrs Didi Walson-Jack, in her opening remarks, noted that the collaboration between the two ministries will help in addressing the problems of poor water sanitation and hygeine services in healthcare facilities for the general wellbeing of the populace.

According to a report by the Global Burden of Dieases Projects, diarrhoea and enteric burden of disease attributed to poor wash is more than 70 per cent and inequitably borne by poor women and children.

Walson-Jack also stressed the ministry’s commitment to achieving an open defecation-free Nigeria by 2025, as well as increasing sustainable access to basic WASH services for all Nigerians by 2030.