Group Seeks Stronger Mechanisms For Sanitation Agencies

The Africa Civil Society
Network on Water and Sanitation (ANEW), has called for the strengthening of monitoring and evaluation mechanisms for water and sanitation activities in the country.
The chairman of ANEW, Mr Leo Atakpu,  told newsmen  in Abuja that the call became imperative due to poor coordination of such activities in the sector.
He called on the three tiers of government to properly share responsibilities in the areas of water and sanitation adding that local governments were the most margnialised in the scheme of things.
“Everyday people attend workshops; the NGOs are doing their own beat. They go to the local governments, they do their intervention but at the end of the day, people don’t follow up.
“People get knowledge and nobody follows up to say what have you done with the knowledge you acquired, how far have you gone in terms of implementation of the lessons you have learnt?
“All that’s not happening currently in Nigeria. So the monitoring and evaluation mechanisms are still low, very weak, we need to strengthen them.
“But the ultimate users of water are the grassroots so they need to devolve power down there so that the government closest to the grassroots will be the one responsible for the provision of water resources to the people.
“So that Federal Government can concern itself to larger dam projects, if Nigeria will do that they will be able to make a difference.
“ But if we continue with the kind of structure, the federal makes all the policy and then you come to the states, they have their own policy, the local government is doing its own thing.
“So nobody is really monitoring even though you are monitoring. It is not effective.’’
Atakpu said that sanitation was not prioritised in the Millennium Development Goals in terms of funding and policy.
He said that as part of its activities, the organisation would fully engage in the process of achieving the post-2015 sustainable development agenda on sanitation by prioritising issues in the sector.
Atakpu said that ANEW was part of monitoring team for Ethekwini declaration on sanitation which was made in South Africa in 2008 with the aim of ending open defecation in Africa.