Nigeria near peak on list of top 10 countries without access to safe water
As the world celebrated World Water Day Tuesday, a new WaterAid briefing, ‘Water: At What Cost? The State of the World’s Water’, examined the most difficult places in the world for people to get clean water, showing that in the developed world, a standard water bill was as little as 0.1 percent of the income of someone earning the minimum wage.
The report, which is WaterAid’s first ever “State of the World’s Water,” ranks nations based on rates of household access to water and on highest populations without access to water, and includes a list of the countries which have improved most in the last 15 years, with Nigeria putting up a poor showing.
While Nigeria features 17 in the list of the top 20 most improved countries for water access over the past 15 years, the African giant is also one of the worst in the world for household water access and features third in the world on a list of the top ten countries with the greatest numbers of people living without access to safe water.
In descending order, the countries on the list, together with their respective populations without access to safe water, include India with 75,777, 99 people; China, 63,166, 533 people; Nigeria, 57,757, 141 people; and Ethiopia, 42, 251, 031 people.
Others are Congo DR, with 33, 906, 771 people; Indonesia, 32, 286, 276 people; Tanzania, 23, 239, 992 people; Bangladesh, 21, 088, 119 people; Kenya, 17, 205, 557 people; and Pakistan, 16, 096, 404.
“However, in many developing countries, people reliant on a tanker truck for their water supply could spend as much as 45 percent of their daily income on water to get just the recommended daily minimum supply,” the WaterAid report states.
It also indicates that, in some of the world’s poorest countries, families relying on black-market vendors could spend up to 100 times as much on water as those reached by government-subsidised tap stands.
“On this World Water Day, it is shocking to realise that a life essential such as water can cost a poor person in the developing world as much as half of their income for an amount that is about one-third of average daily use in the developed world,” Michael Ojo, WaterAid Nigeria country representative, lamented.
“On World Water Day, we call upon our government and leaders around the world to take urgent action towards keeping the promises made in the UN Global Goals on Sustainable Development, and ensure everyone is able to realise their right to access to clean water by 2030,” he said.
Commenting further, Ojo stated that clean drinking water is a right yet an estimated 31 percent of people in Nigeria are still living without access to clean water. Increased competition for water resources and climate change are only exacerbating the crisis, which along with lack of sanitation is responsible for the deaths of more than 68,000 children under five each year in the country.
Worldwide, some 650 million people in the world still do not have access to clean water and more than 2.3 billion do not have access to basic sanitation, with devastating results.
This is addition to the fact that some 315,000 children under five die each year of diarrhoeal diseases related to the lack of these basic rights, and 50 percent of malnutrition cases are linked to chronic diarrhoea caused by lack of clean water, good sanitation and good hygiene, including hand washing with soap.