A minimum of 9.4 million toilets are required yearly if Nigeria will meet its Open Defecation-Free target by 2025, Mr. Timeyin Uwejamomere has said.

Timeyin, the National Coordinator, National Action Plan on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) revealed this at the ongoing National WASH Action Plan Research and Capacity Building Workshop in Abuja.

According to him, any intervention that would be resorted to has to concentrate on the country’s population which presently stands at 191 million because that will amount to the construction of 5,150 toilets on a daily basis.

He added that it is compulsory for partners to think of a remedy as well since funds will not be gotten from the Federal Government alone.

His words, “Our target in Nigeria is open defecation free vision by 2025, so if you divide the population that are practicing open defecation by the number of years that we have left, we need to build 9.4 million toilets across the 37 states.

“So we need to help the capacity of our states to build the capacity of its people to build toilets; one of the things they did in India is to train women to be masons, known as ‘queen masons’, a lot of women who have never been out of their homes before now earn incomes and started having a voice.

“We have key gaps and opportunities for the sanitation and potable water sector based on the statistics that we currently have, perhaps one of the things we need to do is how to deepen this information to see what each state and each local government needs to deliver.

“It is the population of Nigeria that we want to serve, 130 million people need to have even if it’s just a basic toilet or safely managed facility.

“Only about five per cent of our population have anything to do with closed circuit sewer system and the challenge we are dealing with in sanitation is huge and we need over two billion dollars to address this challenge.”

Mr Benson Ajisegiri, the Director, Water Supply and Public Private Partnership, Federal Ministry of Water Resources added, “The plan will embody a new federal-state partnership by which states remain responsible for their WASH sector development plan, while the Federal Government can better guide, support and incentivise state investments and reforms.”