There is a new invention: It is called water

Grandmother Nuratu Ganiyu has seen her Alapata community in Osun State change in the last decade, thanks to a simple thing called water. It is all around her, flowing from at least three bores sited in her village. Its presence has knocked out the diarrhoea, typhoid and worms that plagued adults and children the age […]

Grandmother Nuratu Ganiyu has seen her Alapata community in Osun State change in the last decade, thanks to a simple thing called water.
It is all around her, flowing from at least three bores sited in her village. Its presence has knocked out the diarrhoea, typhoid and worms that plagued adults and children the age of her grandkids.
“That’s our doctor,” she says. In the shade of a tree, she points out a couple of elders nearby. “They don’t even have work to do since the water has come here.”
Alapata isn’t a typical rural community where the stench of defecation from open farm fields wafts around. It already attained “open defecation free” status under a water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programme pushed by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The Fund found last year 50 million people defecate in the open, without access to proper toilets. Another 65 million Nigerians have no access to safe water. Water supply is among planks for political campaigns but up to 40 percent of them in rural areas fail.
UNICEF says the lack across rural and urban communities leaves more children and women vulnerable to sickness and poverty.
“This lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation services is the direct cause of 25 percent of child mortality due to diarrhoeal diseases reported in Nigeria,” it said.
Alapata is among 105 communities – including 15 schools – in Odo-Otin council area of Osun pencilled into a programme to reform water supply and sanitation in 14 states and 28 council areas. In Osun, the programme chose only two council areas, down from seven in its previous phase.
Alapata got its first bore sunk around 2004. Since then three more have come in for the community of some 200, and the 57 households who make it up have all got a toilet.
Akolade Mohammed, resident of Alapata, now volunteers on a committee along with 16 others, pushing WASH into the hearts of men, women and children. It wasn’t easy getting the community to stop drinking from its defecation-polluted stream, he says.
“They even used police to arrest us. I had to fight my wife until she came around,” Mohammed recalls.
“We have had this stream for ages. We didn’t believe we could contract diseases. Until the day some officials brought in chemicals to run water tests. We just didn’t believe we were eating shit. And people are thinking, this is what we have been doing even before you were born,” he added.
Alapata’s stream is relegated to only washing. A long way off, Bolorunduro community also has a stream, that is also relegated to just washing water, after bores supplying water came in.
Fumilayo Aladiran, her friends and their children, drew water from there every day. She went eight times each day, a basin balanced on her head.
“There is no problem of going to the stream again. We fetch water near our house and it is clean,” she says. Now she has more time to attend to her shop in her Oluwaduro corner of the community.
With water came pressure for every household to own a toilet. Now Bolorunduro is declared open defecation free, alongside 55 others in Odo-Otin.
“We are working vigorously to ensure all are ODF,” says Rebecca Akinduro, UNICEF’s consultant for WASH in Odo-Otin. “We are moving faster than other council areas, with support from UNICEF.”
The support is funding by the European Union Commission for Humanitarian Aid. UNICEF handles 70 percent of investment cost for construction or maintenance of any project. Osun State government and Odo-Otin council area split up the remaining 30 percent. Counterpart funding in the 14 states in the project is estimated at N2 billion; only half of that fund has come.
Communities like Bolorunduro and Alapata have to chip in 5 percent to show commitment and ownership.
The council area alone has earmarked water points for 170 communities, 10 schools and five health centres, but hiccups in counterpart funding and some issues mean projects in 54 communities are pending.
Ebenezer AC Elementary and Middle School, Asi just had its borehole finished last week, after the community chose to have their own borehole closer to their children.
The plan is to link the supply to a new toilet built under a project by Universal Basic Education.
Primary four pupil Eniola Olagunde is among 25 students on the environment health club, meeting for 10 minutes every Monday for lectures on hygiene.
She proudly shows other students proper hand-washing using one of four stands set up in front of the school.
Osun’s problem isn’t just killing water scarcity but increasing access in a sustainable manner and ensuring community take responsibility for it, says Segun Moyinowula, the state’s director for sanitation.
Between the two council areas where the WASH project is in place, they already have a total 119 communities, out of over 200, declared open defecation free.
“Others are being followed up and are at different stages of attaining ODF,” says Moyinowula. “All of this gives us the message that the programme is having good expected impact in these communities.”
He adds that: “In most of the communities, before now, cases of diarrhoea, typhoid, disease linked to sanitation and water, were rampant. They were on the increase. Judging from records in health centres, the cases are falling.”
Osun has begun replicating water, sanitation and hygiene projects in its other local government areas, with a separate source of funding from the African Development Bank.
The target: ODF in 330 communities, 47 of which have already attained the status, with others on the verge of it. A second part is 100 boreholes and 200 sanitation facilities in public places where people spend time away from home, among them motor parks and some 136 schools.
Until now, Eniola and her mates fetched water from the community stream as part of their school day. These days, the water is much closer to them and their mothers.