WaterAid Nigeria has marked her 20th anniversary of achievements in Nigeria. In celebrating this milestone, policy dialogue was put together in Abuja today with the theme “Achieving SDG Goal 6 – intergrating WASH in wider development”. According to Micheal Ojo, Country Director, WaterAid Nigeria while giving his keynote address he said it is imperative at the juncture to engage the policy makers, government officials, political representatives from the three tiers of governments as well as citizens in a dialogue on implementation of sustainable development Goals 6.
“Our dialogue today is designed to help us to find out some ‘HOW’ – what is likely to work in our context given the challenges and opportunities of our political, policy and financing arrangements’ he posited.
Honourable Minister of Water Resources, Engineer Suleiman Adamu who chaired the panel discussion identified prevelant challenges mitigating against WASH sector in Nigeria as finance mechanism and sector coordination at Federal and state level which have caused major setbacks in the WASH sector in Nigeria in the last two decades.
He said State and local governments do not always keep to financial commitment, and for us to attain all SDGs we must overcome this issue. “The aim of our programmes in 2016 is to achieve ‘ONE WASH’ programes so as to bring every sector of the economy on board including our financial institutions whether microfinance and regular Banks and make them understand that WASH can equally be a money spinning ventures” he alluded
He said another aspect of this programme is to saturate the airwaves with WASH awareness. “We all need to scale up our plans and projections for sustainable WASH and to scale up, all hands must be on deck”. While addressing the issues around availability of water in every home in Nigeria he explained that the Ministry have equally set in motion water policy which will soon be forwarded to the National Assembly for its final review and approval.
Mrs Christiana Udeh, who was among the panel added that the major challenges in WASH sector in Nigeria has been unavailability of infrastructures, the evil of water pollution either through industrial activities or natural occurrence. She also mentioned lack of technological research in WASH to keep abreast the current trend of technological advancement to solving WASH challenges.
