African charity that improved access to drinking water and sanitation and reduced the chance of cholera deaths in a village in Togo, was on Monday, February 19, 2018 awarded the Kyoto World Water Grand Prize.

The award is granted every three years for outstanding grassroots projects to solve water issues in developing nations.

Judges said the project by the Christian Charity for People in Distress (CCPD), which helped 290 villagers, had cut the risk of disease and death in a community prone to cholera outbreaks.

“The organisation provided a serious and coherent project, with proper monitoring, and demonstrated above all an excellent efficiency,” said Jean Lapègue, a board member of the World Water Council, which adjudicates the award.

Judges also praised the project’s use of ecological toilets as an alternative to pit latrines, Lapègue told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by email.

More than 60 per cent of Togo’s population lives below the poverty line, and many people lack reliable access to drinking water, education, health and electricity, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

In addition, the UNDP said Togo’s natural resources were becoming increasingly scarce, particularly clean water.

The CCPD will receive the award and the two million Japanese yen prize (19,000 dollars) at a ceremony next month in the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, during the eighth World Water Forum.

Lapègue said the prize should help CCPD to extend its project in rural areas of the West African Francophone country of eight million people and also help connect the charity to other actors in the water and sanitation sector.

The award is co-organised by the Japan Water Forum and the World Water Council.

CCPD is the second African charity to win the award after Uganda’s Katosi Women Development Trust won in 2012.

The Federal Ministry of Water Resources has proposed a 12-month emergency action plan to scale up access to sanitation and hygiene services in the country’s public spaces.

This was part of the recommendations at the end of a National Retreat on Revitalisation of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), and made available to News Agency of Nigeria in Abuja on Tuesday, February 20, 2018

The plan showed that, by 2030, every Nigerian would have access to safely managed sanitation and hygiene facilities in cities, small towns, and rural communities.

The plan also stipulates that state and local governments enforce existing building codes and related legislation regarding the minimum number of sanitation facilities required for buildings and facilities.

This would also ensure that where such existing codes and legislations were inadequate, new codes would be drafted and enacted.

In an interview with NAN, Mr Emmanuel Awe, the Director, Water Quality Control and Sanitation, said there was the need for all tiers of government to institutionalise sanitation as a counterpart to water supply.

The director asserted that ignoring sanitation would be detrimental to the wellbeing of the citizenry.

He expressed regret that most policies and programmes from previous administration was solely on water supply, adding that budgeting for sanitation was important to meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.

“Sanitation cannot be ignored, it is a silent killer. Nigeria can reduce its disease burden by making access to Water and Sanitation a priority.

“We need to wake up to the reality to advocate for more funding to scale up sanitation and hygiene before the end of the SDGs.”

He said Nigeria could reduce its disease burden with a working sanitation action plan in place, adding that no fewer than 46 million people practice open defecation in the country.

According to him, no fewer than 2.4 million deaths occur annually from poor sanitation, and stressed the need to improve hygiene education to promote behaviour change toward reducing open defecation practices.

He said there was also the need for all stakeholders to wake up to advocate for more funding for sanitation and hygiene.

Awe noted that Nigeria needed three times the present funding for scaling up sanitation, which he said amounted to about 1.3 per cent of its annual Gross Domestic Product.

He disclosed that the ministry was developing a Sanitation Value Chain Strategy to promote investment in addressing the near absence of wastewater and fecal sludge in Nigeria.

This strategy, he said, would include the promotion of innovative technologies that reuse treated fecal sludge and wastewater into economically-viable byproducts, such as fertilisers, bio-gas, and water for irrigation.

He said the ministry was putting measures in place to launch a national campaign to end open defecation in June, 2018 to create awareness on its dangers and what can be done to reverse the trend.

According to him, the ministry is also working to fast-track the ongoing development of the National Policy on Urban Sanitation, which will be approved and disseminated by August.

By Tosin Kolade

Prolonged power outage and high cost of petrol have worsened the acute water shortage in Yenagoa, the Bayelsa State capital.

Residents now spend more to buy water for domestic uses as they relied on water vendors who sell water in carts as pipe-borne water has dried up.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that a 20-litre jerry can of water, which sold for N20 before, now goes for N30.

Abdullahi Ahmed, a water vendor, said that the price increase was due to the prolonged power outage and exorbitant fuel price which had remained at N200 per litre.

“The light situation in Yenagoa is affecting our businesses; most people with boreholes, where we buy water, are not willing to buy fuel at N200 per litre to pump water.

“Some of them, who use generators to sell to us at higher rates, have no choice, but to pass the cost to our customers, although they complained, we explained to them.

“We do not find it easy to cope with the high demand this dry season; the job of ‘meruwa’ (water vendor) is energy sapping.

“Every day, you have pains all over the body, so what I do is to rest when the sun is much.

“We even charged higher to those who stay on upstairs. We don’t always like to carry water to such customers, we charge like N40 per jerry can for people that stay in first floor, while we take N50 for higher floors,” he said.

The residents said that they spent between N300 and N500 daily on the average on water due to lack of potable public water supply in the state.

Mrs Joyce Tuedor, a housewife, said that she now spends N400 daily on water compared to N250 spent before for the same litres due to the fuel scarcity.

She prayed to see the end of the prolonged power outage which had lasted for weeks.

According to her, she spends additional N120 to buy a bag of 20 sachets of water for drinking.

“This water thing has not been easy for us in the past three weeks and the additional cost is becoming unbearable; we want the government to provide water for residents.

“Even of more concern is the quality of the water that the vendors source from shallow wells which might not meet acceptable public health standards.

“The current water situation can lead to an epidemic should any water borne disease break out, it is God that has been keeping us,” Tuedor said.

By Nathan Nwakamma