Agriculture

Agriculture

What is the role of WaterAid in World water day? World Water day is an opportunity for those of us who are involved in the water, energy sector, what we called the WASH which raise the issue around lack of access to water especially, we also use that to amplify issues around lack of access to sanitation and hygiene as well. Its really important day, it is a globally recognised day. it gives the opportunity to connect with people across the world and identify with those who are still living a life of poverty because they lack access to water and have to go extra-ordinary length to get this basic component of life that some of us take for granted. So World Water day is really an important opportunity for us. And judging by what happened yesterday, it gave us the opportunity to engage directly with government because government is the main duty bearer to ensure that water is provided and people can actually access it without too much of a problem but also help to bring a range of other stakeholders together to ensure that we thinking the same way or we are trying to go on the same direction and go the same direction in terms of the solution that we need to find to the situation. The theme is Water and Jobs, can you highlight on that? Ans. Every year we have a theme for world water day. So this year’s theme is water and jobs. This is to highlight the importance of water to jobs and to work and opportunity, really to highlight that having access to water in terms of the right quantity and quality is important to not just individual’s well-being but the nation’s economic well-being. Across the world 1.5 billion, that is half of all jobs are directly related to water or the water industry and virtually every other job are linked into water in some way or the other, so when you think about the impact or implication of lack of access to water, you think about the impact of productivity for countries or nations. That’s why we taught it was a really good opportunity to look at water and jobs and the impact that they both have. So apart from those work locally in providing water and getting the water to people, we have industries using more water than what we use in terms of drinking. Energy generation for example, agriculture, health amongst other. So the impact of water and jobs is phenomenon and this gives us an opportunity to bring them together. Statistics about Nigeria reveals that about 60 million Nigerians are without safe water, taking into cognisance the climatic conditions of the country and the fact that we have one of the largest water body surrounding us and the fact that we have about 600 dams scattered across the country and yet we are still hearing this, are these figures genuine? This is one of the reasons why I said statistics in Nigeria is abit difficult because they are very few really concrete sources of information that you can have but if you look back in 2000 when we started the journey of the Millennium Development Goals, we have to have a base line and the way that we measure that base line has been developed and improved upon and that is the way that we continue to measure our progress against that base line. So we used the joint monitoring programme of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNICEF which is called JNP for short which is now produces updates yearly which give us how things are improving. WaterAid has produced this report (holding a report in his hand) which you all have in front of you titled: “Water at what cost: The state of the World Water 2016, the statistics are based on the JNP figures because that is the more reliable data that we have. The issue that you painted is a crisis and we need to understand what is on the need for that crisis, so this report actually tells a number of stories, I think one of the stories it tells is when you think about this globally, there is a good news story. The world met the millennium development goals target for water early in 2010, so we actually halfed the number of people across the world without access to water based on the figures we had for 2000. So do we blame government’s failure on corruption in the society? I think it will be too simple to blame it on just corruption. Yes corruption takes the blame for everything that happens in Nigeria. There are three key problems mainly from my perspective. The first is about the chronic under investment, chromic lack of funding for water services by government. That means that the money that really need to go into the sector to expend access the way it should has not gone in and when you look at the budget this, government has budgeted about N44 billion to the ministry of water resources and I know when you do a more detailed analysis there are other departments that do some water provisions like the ministry of agriculture. But looking at the budget of water ministry resources who are the main ministry responsible for providing access to water, the budget is about 0.7% of the total budget this year. Yet this government has signed up to commitments saying they would put 2.1% of its annual budget towards water that has never happened. The budget for this year is actually nearly a doubling of last year’s budget, so when you look at the amount of money that is actually going into the water sector is only about one tenth of the amount of money that analysis has stated that needs to be put into water services for us to be able to provide unilateral access for everyone by 2030, so we need to be investing anything between N400 and N600 billion every year for the next 15 years to be able to actually ensure and attain universal access to everyone. The second is that even when money goes in the money have got to be spent properly and even with the N33 billion that was budgeted last year wasn’t fully spent. So what is your plan as one of the donor agencies, in terms of creating jobs and creating access to better living conditions? WaterAid will spend something in the region of about a billion naira this year and when you compare that to what government is spending, that is one over forty. What that money is intended to do this year is to show how best the services can get to the people who are most in need, so our focus is always on how do we reach the most vulnerable people in our community with the right types of service delivery contents that really response to their need. We will be doing that in six states across the country and we will be tackling the issue of water access and hygiene but will focus on sanitation because sanitation is a bigger disaster for Nigeria, so a lot of our works will be focus on addressing the issue of sanitation.

- by Admin III

Stories by John Oba Abuja The Soil Science Society of Nigeria (SSSN) has called for the establishment of a National Soil Policy and Institute of Soil science that will regulate …

What is the role of WaterAid in World water day? World Water day is an opportunity for those of us who are involved in the water, energy sector, what we called the WASH which raise the issue around lack of access to water especially, we also use that to amplify issues around lack of access to sanitation and hygiene as well. Its really important day, it is a globally recognised day. it gives the opportunity to connect with people across the world and identify with those who are still living a life of poverty because they lack access to water and have to go extra-ordinary length to get this basic component of life that some of us take for granted. So World Water day is really an important opportunity for us. And judging by what happened yesterday, it gave us the opportunity to engage directly with government because government is the main duty bearer to ensure that water is provided and people can actually access it without too much of a problem but also help to bring a range of other stakeholders together to ensure that we thinking the same way or we are trying to go on the same direction and go the same direction in terms of the solution that we need to find to the situation. The theme is Water and Jobs, can you highlight on that? Ans. Every year we have a theme for world water day. So this year’s theme is water and jobs. This is to highlight the importance of water to jobs and to work and opportunity, really to highlight that having access to water in terms of the right quantity and quality is important to not just individual’s well-being but the nation’s economic well-being. Across the world 1.5 billion, that is half of all jobs are directly related to water or the water industry and virtually every other job are linked into water in some way or the other, so when you think about the impact or implication of lack of access to water, you think about the impact of productivity for countries or nations. That’s why we taught it was a really good opportunity to look at water and jobs and the impact that they both have. So apart from those work locally in providing water and getting the water to people, we have industries using more water than what we use in terms of drinking. Energy generation for example, agriculture, health amongst other. So the impact of water and jobs is phenomenon and this gives us an opportunity to bring them together. Statistics about Nigeria reveals that about 60 million Nigerians are without safe water, taking into cognisance the climatic conditions of the country and the fact that we have one of the largest water body surrounding us and the fact that we have about 600 dams scattered across the country and yet we are still hearing this, are these figures genuine? This is one of the reasons why I said statistics in Nigeria is abit difficult because they are very few really concrete sources of information that you can have but if you look back in 2000 when we started the journey of the Millennium Development Goals, we have to have a base line and the way that we measure that base line has been developed and improved upon and that is the way that we continue to measure our progress against that base line. So we used the joint monitoring programme of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNICEF which is called JNP for short which is now produces updates yearly which give us how things are improving. WaterAid has produced this report (holding a report in his hand) which you all have in front of you titled: “Water at what cost: The state of the World Water 2016, the statistics are based on the JNP figures because that is the more reliable data that we have. The issue that you painted is a crisis and we need to understand what is on the need for that crisis, so this report actually tells a number of stories, I think one of the stories it tells is when you think about this globally, there is a good news story. The world met the millennium development goals target for water early in 2010, so we actually halfed the number of people across the world without access to water based on the figures we had for 2000. So do we blame government’s failure on corruption in the society? I think it will be too simple to blame it on just corruption. Yes corruption takes the blame for everything that happens in Nigeria. There are three key problems mainly from my perspective. The first is about the chronic under investment, chromic lack of funding for water services by government. That means that the money that really need to go into the sector to expend access the way it should has not gone in and when you look at the budget this, government has budgeted about N44 billion to the ministry of water resources and I know when you do a more detailed analysis there are other departments that do some water provisions like the ministry of agriculture. But looking at the budget of water ministry resources who are the main ministry responsible for providing access to water, the budget is about 0.7% of the total budget this year. Yet this government has signed up to commitments saying they would put 2.1% of its annual budget towards water that has never happened. The budget for this year is actually nearly a doubling of last year’s budget, so when you look at the amount of money that is actually going into the water sector is only about one tenth of the amount of money that analysis has stated that needs to be put into water services for us to be able to provide unilateral access for everyone by 2030, so we need to be investing anything between N400 and N600 billion every year for the next 15 years to be able to actually ensure and attain universal access to everyone. The second is that even when money goes in the money have got to be spent properly and even with the N33 billion that was budgeted last year wasn’t fully spent. So what is your plan as one of the donor agencies, in terms of creating jobs and creating access to better living conditions? WaterAid will spend something in the region of about a billion naira this year and when you compare that to what government is spending, that is one over forty. What that money is intended to do this year is to show how best the services can get to the people who are most in need, so our focus is always on how do we reach the most vulnerable people in our community with the right types of service delivery contents that really response to their need. We will be doing that in six states across the country and we will be tackling the issue of water access and hygiene but will focus on sanitation because sanitation is a bigger disaster for Nigeria, so a lot of our works will be focus on addressing the issue of sanitation. Read More