Benue, UNICEF drills 1,164 boreholes in rural areas

General Manager, Benue State Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Agency (BERWASSA), James Aper, stated during a chat with newsmen in Makurdi that the development would help to rid the area of the anti social habit of open defecation.
He said that the decision of the donor agency to intervene in the areas of water, sanitation and hygiene was based on the 2012 WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) report, which showed that over 66 million Nigerians lack access to safe water.
The report, he said, depicted that over 109 million people lacked access to mop roved sanitation and nearly 35 million were still defecating in the open with 84 per cent of them being the rural dwellers.
To this end, the benefitting communities which are located in the four local government areas of Tarka, Konshisha, Oju and Ogbadibo, are expected to stop open defecation.
Aper added that the United Kingdom, through UNICEF, also contributed a whooping £29 million for all the FGN/DFID/UNICEF, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) and SHAWN programmes implementation in the state.
“In the area of water supply, over 84 motorised solar schemes and 780 hand pump boreholes have been provided for various communities in four SHAWN local governments areas of Konshisha, Oju, Ogbadibo and Tarka, while over 300 boreholes have been drilled through direct labour, with about 250 broken down hand pump boreholes rehabilitated across the state,” he said.