Nigeria moves to achieve SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

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As part of efforts targeted at achieving Goal 6 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which seeks to ensure sustainable management of water resources and access to safe water and sanitation for all, Nigeria inaugurated the National Coordination Implementation Core Team on SDG Goal 6.

The members of the National Coordination Implementation Core Team on SDGs Goal 6, where inaugurated Wednesday at Abuja by Dr Ibrahim W. Musa, permanent secretary at Nigeria’s Ministry of Water Resources.

While inaugurating the team, Dr Musa lamented that Nigeria couldn’t achieve the targets of the predecessors of the SDGs; the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), for water and sanitation adding that at the close of the MDGs, national access to water supply and sanitation were 69% and 29%, respectively.

“This implies that substantial percentages of the population are still drawing water from unprotected sources. In the same vein, about 70% of Nigerians do not have access to improved and unshared sanitation facilities. National estimate of open defecation rate is 25% which indicates that open defecation is still prevalent across the country,” he said.

He noted that the idea behind the National Coordination Implementation Core Team was to ensure that “real time data on all water and sanitation facilities are collected and processed on regular basis and by so doing, a reliable data base on the progress of SDGs in water and sanitation projects will be achieved.”

The launch of the coordination team took place at the end of a 2-day workshop organized by the water ministry aimed at developing a co-ordination mechanism for all SDGs-related projects and developing strategic action plans that will fast-track the implementation of SDGs-related projects in Nigeria’s water sector as well as collate useful data for effective monitoring of progress in the sector, amongst others.