By sdnonline

The U.S. Agency International Development (USAID) has awarded $10 million (N4.1 billion) over three years to UNICEF to support the Nigerian government’s initiative to improve water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services in Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara States in the Northwest.

Known as Improving Sanitation, Hygiene and Safe Drinking Water in Northwest Nigeria, the activity to be managed by UNICEF will provide life-saving WASH services to more than 300,000 people in need of assistance.

The assistance will help to build community-centered approaches to deliver, operate, and manage sustainable WASH services in rural areas, as well as foster resilience in communities in collaboration with the state governments. It will also help rebuild dilapidated infrastructure and support communities to increase access to proper sanitation, adopt proper hygiene behaviors, and improve water quality.

“USAID is dedicated to ensuring clean water for more Nigerians,” Mission Director Dr. Anne Patterson said. “This new activity with UNICEF will help reduce waterborne diseases to keep more people, especially children, healthy.”

According to the 2019 National Outcome Routine Mapping of WASH services (WASHNORM), 30 percent of Nigerians lack access to basic water services and less than 10 percent have access to safely managed water services. While 44 percent of Nigerians have access to basic sanitation services, 23 percent, or 46 million people, lack access to proper sanitation. Access to safe hygiene facilities nationwide is low, at 16 percent.

In Nigeria, Sokoto and Kebbi states have the lowest levels of access to basic water services at 38 percent and 39 percent, respectively. Access to basic sanitation is also low in Kebbi, Zamfara and Sokoto at 35 per cent, 38 percent, and 41 per cent, respectively. Only five percent of people in Sokoto and one percent in Kebbi have access to safely managed water services.

This shortage of clean water supply, toilets, and handwashing facilities in households across Nigeria presents a formidable challenge. Poor access to WASH services is the major cause of diarrheal morbidity and mortality in Nigeria and is associated with at least 70,000 deaths in children under five each year.

Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic have also reinforced the importance of adequate and safe water, basic sanitation, and proper hygiene practices to stem the spread of the disease in developing countries, including Nigeria.

“We are extremely grateful for the timely and much-needed WASH support from the U. S. government,” said Peter Hawkins, UNICEF’s Country Representative for Nigeria. “The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with prevailing challenges and gaps in WASH services in northwest Nigeria is detrimental to the development of children and rural communities. This assistance is a testament to USAID’s commitment to the children and people of Nigeria.”

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has supported the distribution of supplementary Hausa reading materials – Ina Son Karatu! (I Want to Read! in Hausa) – to 157,000 primary grade learners in Adamawa and Gombe states.

The USAID Strengthening Education in Northeast Nigeria (SENSE) activity, implemented by the American University of Nigeria (AUN), developed the packages for the two states, which contain more than 5.2 million copies of educational reading materials produced with USAID’s evidence-based early grade reading methodology using global best practices.

“Through years of conflict, education in the northeast has been decimated,” USAID Mission Director Anne Patterson said. “Working with AUN, we are helping to rebuild the system by providing materials that employ evidence-based methods to start thousands of children off on a lifetime of reading.”

At ceremonies in Gombe on May 26 and Yola on May 19, each learner received a take-home booklet that contains up to 30 different stories and books at varying levels designed to help them advance their reading competence over a whole academic year. SENSE has encouraged parents to ask their children to read the stories to them after school to further improve their reading proficiency.

Over three years, SENSE will reach more than 200,000 learners, and train and provide teaching materials to 5,000 teachers to improve reading in the Hausa language. SENSE helps enable the education systems in Gombe and Adamawa to deliver accessible high-quality education that responds to the needs of all children.

The SENSE approach to encouraging reading is supported by research on effective methods of teaching reading in the early grades. A USAID-supported study by the American Institutes for Research identifies that the availability of plentiful reading materials in different forms relevant to the reader’s background, language, and interests for independent reading results in significantly higher results.

The SENSE activity has also trained and supplied teachers and learners with Mu Karanta! Hausa teaching and learning materials developed under its sister USAID Northern Education (NEI) Plus activity, and the Reading and Numeracy Activity funded by UNICEF.