SWA private sector partners in Nigeria have launched ‘OPSWASH’ – a national body that co-ordinates private sector efforts and cultivates multi-stakeholder innovations in the water and sanitation sector. It has a specific focus on how the private sector can support the Government’s objective to end open defecation in the country by 2025.
OPSWASH is an idea developed by Zenith Water Projects, whose representative attended SWA’s 2019 Sector Ministers’ Meeting and returned to Nigeria inspired to seek ways of increasing collaboration between the Government and wider stakeholders in the country’s sector. In the space of just a few months, the OPSWASH national body for the private sector was born. At the official launch for OPSWASH, the Minister for Water Resources reminded sector representatives of the President’s call to end open defecation in Nigeria by 2025. He warmly welcomed the creation of the new national body to coordinate private sector efforts for the first time towards this goal.
This is a call towards leveraging the capabilities of the private sector in a collaborative manner. Through the creation of OPSWASH, there now exists one body with one goal.
In November 2020, OPSWASH launched its ambitious ‘FLUSH!T’ campaign. The project involves the provision of two million toilets each year by 2025, and is supported by innovative sector financing. This includes a tax credit scheme for companies and organizations investing in the sector, and government-issued ‘Blue Bonds’ to mobilize private capital, as well as public-private partnerships for financing decentralized sewage treatment systems. OPSWASH, and the FLUSH!T campaign are both remarkable contributions to the sector in Nigeria. They are a testimony to what inspired thinking can achieve in a very short space of time – setting an example of what private sector engagement in the water, sanitation and hygiene sector can look like at the global level.
These moves by the private sector are contributing to a broader sense of building momentum for the Nigerian sector, helping to realize the President’s call to end open defecation by 2025, and complementing increasing levels of political will in the sector. Nigeria’s Minister for Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu, has described how this increased political will is benefitting the sector, explaining that “President Buhari had met with [SWA’s High-level Chair] Mr. Kevin Rudd in 2019. Subsequently, when the economic stimulus was launched to deal with the lockdown effects, water and sanitation were given a priority, and when we prepared our action plan, the President and the Minister of Finance, who was also engaged through SWA, made sure things changed for the better for WASH.”