Computation of Water-Stress Ratio in Western Nigeria

An increasing world population exerts a continually growing demand on usable freshwater resources. Access to water plays a key role in development; it supports human life in direct consumption, agricultural uses and industrial activities. Time and drudgery involved to access safe drinking water resulted to loss of human resources and capital, thus affecting nearly every household life. This paper focuses on the determination of water-stressed ratio using Integrated Water Measurement Tool (IWMT). Structured simple time analysis and Adjusted composite index approaches were employed to compute (IWMT) values in all the sampled areas. Variables such as access to safe water coverage, water availability and use of water were considered. IWMT values from the two approaches show that Ese-Odo is the most water-scarce region with least IWMT values of 14.1 (Adjusted composite index: ACI) and highest value of 2.6 minsl -1 (Structured simple time analysis: SSA), while Owo, Ondo-West and Ose local government areas experience fair distribution of protected water supply with IWMT values of 1.05 minsl -1 , 20.8; 1.00 minsl -1 , 17.2; and 0.55 minsl -1 , 16.9 respectively. The results obtained indicate that constructive investments in water and sanitation would reduce proportion of household income spent in sourcing for safe drinking water, prevention of water-related diseases and in turn improves productivity. However, this paper concludes that top-down technical approach must be balanced with a bottom-up mechanism in order to derive realistic systems to prevent persistent water scarcity, shortage and to draw realistic adaption measures