At Koza primary school in Mai’Adua, Hassana and her friend finish a routine task of washing one of six toilets in their school premises, then go through the “process” of washing their hands.
Hand washing is a big part of their day—and has been since the environmental officer, Lawal Abdullahi, helped set up an environmental health club at the school under a water-sanitation-and-hygiene programme funded by DFID and run by UNICEF.
Hassana and her mates use any of some 12 taps in their school—mostly hand pump bore hole connected to an overhead tank.
By August, the intervention was responsible for 61 hand pump bore holes and 11 motorized bore holes across Mai’Adua alone, reaching some 13,600 school boys and girls.
Across the six council areas of Katsina where the Sanitation, Hygiene and Water in Nigeria (SHAWN) project is ongoing, both types of bore holes combined have reached 321.
An estimated 485,700 people in the six council areas now have access to safe water—slightly less than the 650,000 the project hoped to reach. But at least eight in 10 of the improved water facilities sited in the areas are functional, according to the project coordinators.
Before the project, “we fetched water from wells,” says Hauwa Sani, a mother of four. This in a community where open defecation has threatened ground water sources until residents bought into a campaign to end defecation in the open.
Clean water supply means fewer cases of diarrhoeal diseases in her children. Though she lives across the road from a primary health centre, she hasn’t had to use the clinic. “None of my children has been sick in the last one or two years,” she claims.
Her neighbour, Gambo Adamu notes changes she’s seen with safe water. “The water we use for cooking is from solar [a solar-powered bore]. We keep it in jerricans that we keep closed, and the solar [bore] is not very far, just behind the house. When we get the water, we don’t add anything [purifier] to clean it. We drink it like that, because it is tap water and clean.”
Koza has edged into the 58% of Nigerians with access to safe water supply, but up to four in 10 Nigerians still lack access, according to the latest Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey for 2013.
It also added that 27 percent of house holds in Nigeria have specific place for hand washing. Water and soap are available in 48 percent of the households where place for washing hand was observed.
According to the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey about six in every 10 households in Nigeria are using an improved source of drinking water with higher percentage of 73 percent in urban areas against 51 percent in rural areas.
Wealth quintile and level of education have influence on the household source of drinking water.
Generally, the most important source of improved drinking water is the borehole, which contributes 32 out of the 59 percent using improved water source.
Overall, 31 percent of household members use an improved sanitation facility (not shared). The sanitation indicator shows similar disparities as the improved source of water: only 26 percent of household members in rural areas use improved sanitation facility against 41 percent in urban area.
Still, 29 percent of the population practices open defecation.
The community maintains its new status by having and sustaining a committee for WASH, with the community leader, Maigari Falalu, as its head. The committee comes with a combined water and sanitation package in a project that should end this year, but Falalu says his community has seen diarrhoea, cholera and other diseases fall off.
“They are not rampant, but with the start of WASH, living conditions are much better,” he says.
In Yankara, a few minutes’ drive from Koza, Maigari Ibrahim first saw the signs of safe water flooding his community and stopping their dependence on ground wells.
It came from some 163 hand pump bore holes paid for by DFID in Mai’Adua, Bakori, Kaita, Dutsin-Ma, Faskari and Sandamu—alongside 54 other government-issue bores.
He gets water at home, but the Yankara community school where he spends time with children doesn’t. The new toilets are under-used because water just isn’t there, he says.
Seven water facilities built or upgraded in Mai’Adua exclude the children from more than 41,000 with access to improved water facilities across three local government areas.
Yankara’s children could get the water they need, if negotiations allow the programme to continue beyond 2013—when it hopes to expand to other council areas.
When that happens, Yankara could see further changes that its neighbours have seen—direct labour in drilling bore holes helping Katsina’s Rural Water and Sanitation Agency increase its savings of N43.5 million it has made so far.
At the same time, Yankara would need to strengthen its WASH committee—one of 207 in Mai’Adua—to ensure its residents claim ownership of any water project sited there.
And it starts with mothers like Gambo Adamu teaching their children about routine hand washing.
Explains Adamu: “When they come back from playing, we tell them to wash their hands. When they go to the toilet, we ask them to wash their hands with soap or ash, and they do it the way we tell them. The children that don’t obey, we correct them, pull their ears to let them know why they should do it.”
Hassana and her mates use any of some 12 taps in their school—mostly hand pump bore hole connected to an overhead tank.
By August, the intervention was responsible for 61 hand pump bore holes and 11 motorized bore holes across Mai’Adua alone, reaching some 13,600 school boys and girls.
Across the six council areas of Katsina where the Sanitation, Hygiene and Water in Nigeria (SHAWN) project is ongoing, both types of bore holes combined have reached 321.
An estimated 485,700 people in the six council areas now have access to safe water—slightly less than the 650,000 the project hoped to reach. But at least eight in 10 of the improved water facilities sited in the areas are functional, according to the project coordinators.
Before the project, “we fetched water from wells,” says Hauwa Sani, a mother of four. This in a community where open defecation has threatened ground water sources until residents bought into a campaign to end defecation in the open.
Clean water supply means fewer cases of diarrhoeal diseases in her children. Though she lives across the road from a primary health centre, she hasn’t had to use the clinic. “None of my children has been sick in the last one or two years,” she claims.
Her neighbour, Gambo Adamu notes changes she’s seen with safe water. “The water we use for cooking is from solar [a solar-powered bore]. We keep it in jerricans that we keep closed, and the solar [bore] is not very far, just behind the house. When we get the water, we don’t add anything [purifier] to clean it. We drink it like that, because it is tap water and clean.”
Koza has edged into the 58% of Nigerians with access to safe water supply, but up to four in 10 Nigerians still lack access, according to the latest Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey for 2013.
It also added that 27 percent of house holds in Nigeria have specific place for hand washing. Water and soap are available in 48 percent of the households where place for washing hand was observed.
According to the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey about six in every 10 households in Nigeria are using an improved source of drinking water with higher percentage of 73 percent in urban areas against 51 percent in rural areas.
Wealth quintile and level of education have influence on the household source of drinking water.
Generally, the most important source of improved drinking water is the borehole, which contributes 32 out of the 59 percent using improved water source.
Overall, 31 percent of household members use an improved sanitation facility (not shared). The sanitation indicator shows similar disparities as the improved source of water: only 26 percent of household members in rural areas use improved sanitation facility against 41 percent in urban area.
Still, 29 percent of the population practices open defecation.
The community maintains its new status by having and sustaining a committee for WASH, with the community leader, Maigari Falalu, as its head. The committee comes with a combined water and sanitation package in a project that should end this year, but Falalu says his community has seen diarrhoea, cholera and other diseases fall off.
“They are not rampant, but with the start of WASH, living conditions are much better,” he says.
In Yankara, a few minutes’ drive from Koza, Maigari Ibrahim first saw the signs of safe water flooding his community and stopping their dependence on ground wells.
It came from some 163 hand pump bore holes paid for by DFID in Mai’Adua, Bakori, Kaita, Dutsin-Ma, Faskari and Sandamu—alongside 54 other government-issue bores.
He gets water at home, but the Yankara community school where he spends time with children doesn’t. The new toilets are under-used because water just isn’t there, he says.
Seven water facilities built or upgraded in Mai’Adua exclude the children from more than 41,000 with access to improved water facilities across three local government areas.
Yankara’s children could get the water they need, if negotiations allow the programme to continue beyond 2013—when it hopes to expand to other council areas.
When that happens, Yankara could see further changes that its neighbours have seen—direct labour in drilling bore holes helping Katsina’s Rural Water and Sanitation Agency increase its savings of N43.5 million it has made so far.
At the same time, Yankara would need to strengthen its WASH committee—one of 207 in Mai’Adua—to ensure its residents claim ownership of any water project sited there.
And it starts with mothers like Gambo Adamu teaching their children about routine hand washing.
Explains Adamu: “When they come back from playing, we tell them to wash their hands. When they go to the toilet, we ask them to wash their hands with soap or ash, and they do it the way we tell them. The children that don’t obey, we correct them, pull their ears to let them know why they should do it.”
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