In many rural communities in our country today, the challenge is critical as women and children trek long distances to fetch water from streams and ponds that are contaminated. Even in the so-called modern cities like Lagos, and Abuja, the federal capital, a large proportion of people have no access to drinking water and, as a joint World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) recently observed, many often resort to using any available space for their convenience. For those who can afford it, boreholes are indiscriminately dug. But that too constitutes its own problems as it undermines the water table and threatens future supply of the commodity. In the absence of water from piped supplies and protected wells, millions of Nigerians living in both rural and urban areas consume what is available.
