Following the importance of hand washing in preventing the spread of waterborne and infectious diseases, experts have stressed the need for African countries like Nigeria to guarantee access to safe water and hygiene facilities as human rights.
Unfortunately, millions of persons in the Continent including, hundreds of thousands of school-going children, do not have access to handwashing facilities with soap.
Sadly too, people living in rural areas, urban slums, disaster-prone areas, and low-income countries are the most vulnerable and the most affected.
Without improved access to safe Water, Hygiene and Sanitation(WASH) curbing water-borne diseases, malnutrition and stunting would be extremely hard.
Poor sanitation is linked to the transmission of Infectious and diarrhoeal diseases such as cholera and dysentery, as well as typhoid, intestinal worm infections, and polio. It exacerbates stunting and contributes to the spread of antimicrobial resistance.
Therefore, access to safe Water, Hygiene and Sanitation(WASH) needs to be guaranteed as a human right.
A well-managed water cycle underpins progress across the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, particularly in hunger, gender equity, health, education, livelihoods, sustainability, and ecosystems.
Similarly, research has shown that improved access to safe water and hygiene has a strong multi-level impact on the health indices of any country.
Further, the overall healthcare indicators could potentially be adversely affected on some levels by improved access to WASH. The health indicators include diarrhea, nutrition, complementary food hygiene, female psychosocial stress, and violence, maternal and newborn health.
Others are menstrual hygiene management, school attendance, and oral vaccine performance, waterborne and neglected tropical diseases.
World Health Organisation (WHO) recognises access to Safe Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) services as an essential precautionary measure for protecting human health from the onslaught of emerging diseases, epidemics, and pandemics like COVID-19.
In addition, studies show that improved WASH can address the water crisis, a critical age-long problem in many African countries such as Nigeria.
It is not news that many people grew up meeting the problem of WASH as children in the villages, and slums even in many poor suburbs in popular Nigerian cities. In many villages, the stream serves multiple purposes and is the primary source of water for domestic use.
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The situation has not changed much today. Open defecation into the stream is still a common practice. Yet the stream serves as a place for bathing, fishing, and recreation. In a few communities where you found spring water, residents regarded the scarce natural resource as a goldmine. In many instances, people still travel long distances along dangerous bush paths to source both spring and stream water and expose themselves to bites from reptiles and sexual violations by humans.
Girls, women, and children are the most vulnerable, and disproportionally burdened by the scarcity of clean drinking water. In most African societies, women are the collectors, managers, and guardians of water, which they share with their children, especially the girls. The trend promotes school absenteeism, increasing school dropout among girls.
Despite the emergence of boreholes, which have replaced pipe-borne water in many parts of the country, the situation is growing worse today,
Many citizens at both urban and rural community levels hardly have access to safe drinking water, hygienic toilets, and soap, despite boreholes’ availability mainly dug through private efforts. Even when they have access to clean water and soap, many children forget to wash their hands, despite regular demonstrations and monitoring.
Sadly, many households cannot afford one good meal in a day to meet their educational expenses due to the economic downturn.
WASH brings together several interventions that frequently affect a wide range of direct outcomes beyond just health.
According to the United Nations Children’s Fund(UNICEF) clean water, basic toilets, and good hygiene practices are essential for the survival and development of children.
Poor access to improved water and sanitation in Nigeria remains a major contributing factor to high morbidity and mortality rates among children under five. The use of contaminated drinking water and poor sanitary conditions result in increased vulnerability to water-borne diseases, including diarrhoea, which leads to the deaths of more than 70,000 children under five annually.
Seventy-three percent of the diarrhoeal and enteric disease burden is associated with poor access to adequate water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and is disproportionately borne by poorer children.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), “Frequent episodes of WASH-related ill-health in children, contribute to absenteeism in school, and malnutrition. Only 26.5 percent of the population uses improved drinking water sources and sanitation facilities. Also, 23.5 percent of the population defecate in the open.”
To address the WASH crisis in the country, the Federal Government of Nigeria launched the National Action Plan for the Revitalisation of the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) sector and declared a State of Emergency in the WASH sector in 2018. The National Action Plan is a three-phase plan to revitalise the WASH sector comprising: an 18-month emergency plan; a 5-year recovery programme and a 13-year revitalisation strategy.
The National Action Plan comprises five interrelated components: Governance, Sustainability, Sanitation, Funding and Financing, and Monitoring and Evaluation. In addition to the National Action Plan, a national sanitation campaign tagged ‘Clean Nigeria: Use the Toilets’ was launched to address the sanitation crisis and deliver an open defecation-free Nigeria by 2025.
Truly, the time to strengthen health sector capacities to promote safe WASH and to take up its public health oversight role in WASH programmes including effective outbreak response systems is now.
