Nigeria loses 400 Children Daily To Diarrhoea –UNICEF

In a four-day ”˜National Stakeholders Workshop on Draft Hygiene Promotion Strategy’ in Abuja, the United Nations International Children Emergency Fund, UNICEF revealed that about 400 children under the age of five, die daily due to diarrhoea-related diseases in the country.This workshop was put together by UNICEF in collaboration with the National Tax Group on Sanitation and the Federal Ministry of Water Resources.Kannan Nadar, the Chief, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) UNICEF Nigeria said the deaths could be avoided if proper measures were adopted.He added that was a need to beef up establishment of basic sanitation facilities and awareness on proper hygiene and sanitation practices.Nadar mentioned that diarrhoea is fuelled by unhygienic practices in the processes of food preparation, eating with dirty hands, contaminated water and a host of other factors.Since children are prone to infections, the head of WASH maintained that diarrhoea related deaths can be minimized if the culture of hand-washing is inculcated in children from a tender age.The UNICEF report states that: “As per WHO/UNICEF-led joint monitoring programme 2015 in Nigeria, only 29 per cent of the population has access to improved sanitation facilities, 34 per cent rural population still defecate in open and 30 per cent indulge in other unimproved sanitation.”The open defecation practice in Nigeria, according to Nadar, has placed the country among the top five in the world whose practices are unhygienic.