It is less than 40 days to Nigeria’s 2025 open defecation deadline, yet about one in four Nigerians still lack access to clean toilet facilities, with many resorting to using bushes and other unsafe alternatives.

This was revealed in the Nigeria General Household Survey, published on Thursday. The survey, which was aimed at tracking household resilience over time, reports that Nigeria’s sanitation status is rather dire.

Among those with toilet facilities, only 5.6% have access to piped sewage systems, while 22.7% use pit latrines with a slab, according to the report.

Open defecation disproportionately affects female-headed households, with 28.9% lacking access to facilities compared to 23.6% of their counterparts.

Geographically, the North has the highest prevalence of households without proper facilities. According to the report, the North Central zone leads in households lacking toilet facilities, while the North West zone has the lowest percentage.

READ MORE: Clean Public Toilets Are Available on Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, but Residents Still Defecate in the Open

In urban areas, flush toilets connected to septic tanks are more common, but access remains limited.

The current sanitation crisis shows little progress from when Nigeria’s Roadmap to End Open Defecation by 2025 was conceived in 2014 and launched in 2016. At the time, one in four Nigerians practised open defecation, with rural areas recording a 34% prevalence rate and urban areas having 15%.

In 2018, President Muhammadu Buhari declared a state of emergency in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector. He launched the Clean Nigeria: Use the Toilet campaign, where the plan to end open defecation by 2025 was made public.

But by 2019, Nigeria was reported to have the second highest rate of open defecation globally after India, according to UNICEF. To combat this, Nigeria issued an executive order (009). Among many other things, the order stated that Nigeria needed to build two million toilets annually until 2025 to end open defecation.

However, only 180,000 to 200,000 toilets are reportedly built each year, according to Jane Bevan, UNICEF’s chief of the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) project in 2023. Bevan added that Nigeria needed an additional 20 million toilets to end open defecation by 2030.

So far, only Jigawa State has been certified open defecation free in Nigeria. Also, just 135 local government areas and 30,000 communities have achieved open defecation-free (ODF) status, according to Telurmun Urstev, Nigeria’s Minister of Water Resources.

Open defecation comes with steep costs. Per a Vanguard report, Monday Johnson, a UNICEF WASH specialist, estimated the economic cost of open defecation in Nigeria at N1.55 trillion annually — equivalent to $3.5 billion. Of this, households bear a N1.09 trillion burden, while government costs amount to N457 billion.

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The health consequences are equally severe. In 2023, the federal government reported that over 3.5 million Nigerian children suffer from diarrheal diseases annually, primarily due to poor sanitation and hygiene.

Funding, as far as the government sources are concerned, is not promising. Nigeria needs a $10 billion investment to achieve universal access to basic WASH services by 2030. This is about eight times the current investment in that sector, according to the water resources minister.

In tandem with the data, EQ has, in the past, reported instances of prevalent open defecation in Nigeria at the grassroots level, either for cultural reasons or for lack of access.

In 2023, for instance, EQ reported how, despite the presence of public toilets, people still practised open defecation in communities along Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. EQ also reported how lack of access to clean toilets disproportionately affected pupils in selected schools in Ibadan, Oyo State.
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