A member of the Presidential Steering Committee on Sanitation and National Coordinator of the Organised Private Sector in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, Nicholas Igwe, on Tuesday, blamed the persistent water and sanitation crisis in Nigeria and across Africa on the exclusion of private investors from the sector.
Speaking in Abuja during a media briefing ahead of a conference aimed at addressing funding gaps in the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene sector, Igwe said the sector had remained heavily dependent on donor agencies and civil society organisations because governments failed to create the institutional framework needed to attract private capital.
He argued that the challenge facing the sector was not a lack of funding or technology but the absence of structures capable of encouraging long-term private investment.
“How is it possible that a world that has built fibre optics across ocean floors, that has put rovers on Mars, that has developed vaccines for previously incurable diseases, more than 600 million people on the African continent still lack access to a reliably safe water source, and nearly twice that number lack access to basic sanitation?
“The scale of this failure is not the result of technological limitation. It is not the result of insufficient understanding. It is not even primarily the result of insufficient funding. It is the result of a structural failure,” he said.
