Appraisal of Households’ Coping Strategies to Water Poverty in Bida, Niger State

Abstract

Water is needed to support socio-economic activities such as agriculture, mining, food production and for maintaining healthy ecosystems. This paper examines household coping strategies to water poverty by residents of Bida. Data was gathered using structured questionnaires administered to 420 households in the ancient city in North-central Nigeria. Field data was acquired through social survey involving multistage sampling – (cluster and Random sampling) and analysed with computer statistical packages of Microsoft Excel and the Scientific Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Focused group discussion (FGDs) was also utilized to solicit further information from the residents. Most of the respondents sampled were married (93.6%) and uses water borehole as the primary source of domestic water, that is usually located outside residential compounds (81.4%), that imposes walking long distances to get water. The inadequacy or non-availability of domestic water is partly due to failure of public water supply system and rapid increase in urban population and unguided urbanization in the study area. The economic factors of pricing of water; social factors of conflict over limited water sources; physical factor of topography; together with the political influence were also observed as major factors militating against effective access to water. The study recommends that community participation from the planning to management levels should be encouraged to meet urban water needs that emphasized equitable distribution of water facilities without undue political influence, but rather accessed by the factors of sustainability viewed through population and levels of usage.