While India looks forward to becoming an open-defecation free country in 2019, its African counterpart in terms of open-defecation– Nigeria– will become the world leader of the menace once India reaches her target. Writing for The Indian Express, Minister of Water Resources, Federal Republic of Nigeria– Suleiman H Adamu– said that the country is challenged by India’s on-going Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) and its success has spurred Nigeria.
Now, Nigeria is set to remodel its Open Defecation Free (ODF) campaign based on India’s SBM model. Officials from Nigeria will soon be studying their Indian colleagues to better understand how Swachh Bharat Mission can be adapted to the Nigerian context, the minister wrote. He added that the country hopes to exemplify their success for other African countries by following the Indian example.
Lauding SBM, the minister said that the mission is a testimony to the world community as it has shown that with strong political will, appropriate strategies, mobilisation of the populace, and adequate deployment of resources, Sustainable Development Goals are achievable.
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He also said that as SBM has led to a drastic cut in the population practising open defecation in India, “Plans were already being made for a Nigeria mission to India when I received an invitation to the Mahatma Gandhi International Sanitation Conference (MGISC), in October 2018,” he added.
The event helped him in getting the real feel of Swachh Bharat Mission and also helped him to understand that India’s endeavour in SBM has made the difference in a considerably short span of time. “I was awed and sold”, he wrote.
The similarities between the two nations are abound; not in the terms of merely the population or the abundance of natural resources but also in the challenges these two countries are facing in the matters of public administration, especially related to water, sanitation and hygiene sector. Together they are clubbed as WASH. Sadly, India and Nigeria have been the world’s top countries facing the open-defecation peril.
However, with the introduction of Swachh Bharat Mission, the problem has been curbed to a considerable extent.
