Benue State Government, in collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, has provided over two thousand boreholes to communities in eight Local Government Areas of the state.
Outgoing UNICEF Chief Field Officer in Nigeria, Dr Ibrahim Conteh who disclosed this Tuesday, January 18th, 2022 at the Benue Peoples House during a farewell visit on the Governor, said the feat was achieved in a period of four years.
Dr Conteh stated that the intervention was to ensure that the most deprived communities have access to safe drinking water which he said could save the people, especially children and women from contracting water borne diseases.
The UNICEF Chief Field Officer, who is moving to Afghanistan, stated that the UN Agency had gone a step further to connect the boreholes to primary health care centres and primary schools in the communities and assured that they would also undertake rehabilitation of the boreholes.
According to Dr Conteh, UNICEF had also expended about one million dollars to provide temporary learning centres in IDPs across the state as well as partnered the ministry of education to ensure that children were enrolled in schools.
He commended Governor Samuel Ortom for always providing the needed counterpart funding to make the work of UNICEF easier as well as consistently feeding the IDPs to ensure that children living in the camps were not malnourished.
Ortom expressed appreciation to UNICEF for assisting the state through various interventions and assured it that apart from the counterpart funding, Government would ensure that facilities provided by the UN Agency were well managed.
The Governor lamented unequal treatment of IDPs in Benue State as compared to what happens in the North Eastern part of Nigeria, stressing that the development was against justice, fairness and equity.
Governor Ortom prayed God to grant the UNICEF Chief Field Officer success in his new assignment in Afghanistan where he is redeployed to help intervene in humanitarian crisis.
Local Government Areas where the boreholes are sited include Konshisha, Katsina Ala, Guma, Tarka, Buruku, Ogbadibo, Oju and Obi.
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