By Kingsley Adegboye

Shantytown Empowerment Foundation SHEF, a non-governmental and non-profit organisation under the auspices of the African Cities Research Consortium that champions the transformation of slums and informal settlements in Nigeria, has introduced the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) project in the Okerube community in Ikotun-Igando Local Council Development Area LCDA, Lagos state.

The community-based project is specifically about water and sanitation in Okerube, which lacks these basic social amenities.

In his opening remarks at the introduction of the pilot scheme to stakeholders at a meeting last Thursday in Okerube, Mr Rasheed Shittu, Executive Director, Shantytown Empowerment Foundation SHEF, said the essence of the gathering was necessitated by the nature of the project being introduced, which is community-based.

According to Shittu, the coming together of the community stakeholders became imperative in order for them to accept the project, just as all tiers of government would be appealed to, to accept the project, and provide all necessary logistics to ensure the success of the project, which will be completed in phases. He said the community must provide land for the project as a starting point.

Explaining about the project, he said “The project we are introducing today to the community is funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), in collaboration with the University of Manchester, and Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development, University of Lagos, Akoka, Yaba which is the leading agency in Lagos.

“The reason we chose Okerube community is because it is one of SDI Nigeria federation communities, and they have existing structure such as women-led water committee with which they have been able to open water trust fund account managed by the committee. They have different stakeholders in the community. They have the CDA, different entrepreneurs, small scale business owners in the community

“We have other organised communities too but since it is a pilot scheme,we cannot just start to pick other communities, that is why we picked Okerube as a pilot scheme.

“The benefit of the project is that it is community driven, and one of the benefits is that we are looking towards a sustainable model that will surpass even the community itself and in the past, some of these community-based projects became abanbdoned. So, that is why we want to ensure that we are coming with a model that is going to be driven by community which we are going to support.

“We will have a committee comprising all stakeholders in the committee to ensure that they manage the projects effectively well. Like I said during my speech, you need government, if you say you don’t need government, how do you intend to operate? So, we need government. This ACRC project is a very big project that we are going to carry out research.

“We are going to investigate to find out how people source water, how do they live with water, how do they relate with water and without water, and we have different phases under the project that will ensure that we get all these details because it is going to be driven and led by the community.”

“We are not going to be the one to propose. We are prioritising our priorities and that is why we are appealing to them that we also need the buying of the government at all levels, while also ensuring that we get land to be able to at least have that project to take place.

“We are not working in isolation and we don’t need to work in isolation, that is why we are having this project introduction that will bring in all the stakeholders in the community. We have Iyaloja team here (Market women), we have Olori Odo (Youth Leader), Omonile and many stakeholders and several benefits will come out of this when they amplify the voices of the community from this project introduction..

“You heard from my speech when I was introducing the project team. I said we have Co-Lead Academia, Safeguarding Lead.  Learning, monitoring and evaluation lead are part of the team. 

During this project, we mentioned the benefit. We are going to train them in different aspects and that include capacity building.

“We have capacity enhancement, employment, infrastructure etc. These are people that will manage, maintain the day to day operations of the infrastructure when we have the project.”