The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has raised concerns that rapid urbanisation in Nigeria is outpacing sanitation infrastructure, worsening open defecation, and exposing millions to preventable public health risks.
Mr. Monday Johnson, WASH Specialist at the UNICEF Lagos Field Office, stated this on Thursday in Ilaji town, Ibadan, during a media dialogue aimed at improving Urban Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH).
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the workshop was organised by the Oyo State Ministry of Information in collaboration with UNICEF.
Participants in the media dialogue were drawn from the six Southwest states and Edo.
Referencing the WASH National Outcome Routine Mapping 2021, Johnson said Nigeria’s increasing urban population, now over half of the total population, is expanding faster than the country’s sanitation systems can cope with.
“As of 2023, approximately 54.3 per cent of Nigeria’s population, which is about 123.7 million people, live in urban areas, up from 29.7 per cent in 1990.
“This growth, at an annual rate of 3.51 per cent , is outpacing the expansion of sanitation infrastructure.
” Overcrowded urban slums with limited space, inadequate containment systems, and poor access to safely managed sanitation are exacerbating open defecation and environmental health risks,” he said.
The UNICEF WASH specialist noted that Nigeria’s sanitation crisis mirrors a broader regional trend in West and Central Africa (WCA), one of the fastest-growing regions in the world.
“Across the WCA region, urban populations are projected to grow from 52 per cent in 2023 to as high as 68 per cent by 2050,” he said.
Johnson stressed that while 85 percent of Nigeria’s urban population now has access to basic drinking water, only 45 percent enjoy safely managed water systems.
He added that access to safely managed sanitation remains “critically low,” with just 25.4 per cent of urban residents covered, while over 150 million Nigerians still lack basic sanitation services.
“Open defecation persists in many urban areas.
“Access to basic hygiene services is also very low, with less than 35 per cent of the urban population having handwashing facilities,” he said.
According to him, inequality is also a major obstacle to achieving universal sanitation coverage, with marginalised groups, including women, children, and persons with disabilities, facing higher barriers to accessing safe water, sanitation, and hygiene.
Johnson pointed out that limited human capacity, outdated policies, and weak institutional coordination have slowed Nigeria’s progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
He identified the lack of an urban sanitation coordination framework as a key governance gap and called for immediate reforms to strengthen institutional and human capacity.
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