Health
UNICEF Promises To Partner RSG On WASH
The United Nations
Children’s Fund (UNICEF), has said that it would partner with the Rivers State Government in ensuring that the state gets and delivers safe drinking water and good sanitation habits to its citizenry.
The UNICEF Chief, Rivers Field Office, Dr Wilbroad Ngambi made the promise during a courtesy visit on the State Commissioner for Health, Dr Theophilus Odagme in his office in Port Harcourt, recently.
According to Ngambi, UNICEF would among other things, assist the state in having increasing access to safe drinking water and sanitation thereby attaining a hygienic and healthy state.
While noting that most of the nations’ drinking water sources were contaminated, unsafe for drinking and posing a great challenge on the health of the people, Ngambi stressed the need for partnership among stakeholders toward meeting the water, sanitation and hygienic needs of the people maintaining that UNICEF would play its role in making this achievable.
Meanwhile, a Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) consultant with UNICEF, Dipak Roy has maintained that for Nigeria to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target on water and sanitation, efforts must be assigned to reduce duplicity and stressed the need for private sectors to scale up sanitation and hygiene to reach the under-served.
Roy said “there is the need for capacity building and institutional strengthening for all organisations working on sanitation marketing to reduce open defecation in the country and hygiene promotion is an important fact to end it. To this, Nigeria must make it a priority for the good health of its people”.
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