NGO vows to amplify voices of Ona-Ara community residents

As part of efforts to mark the 2025 International Women’s Day, a nongovernmental organization, Help Initiative for Social Justice and Humanitarian Development, visited Badeku community in Ona-Ara Local government, Oyo State for a town hall sessions with the community’s representatives and women.

During the meeting, it was revealed that for over 15 years, residents of Badeku community in Ona-ara Local government, Oyo state have shed silent tears and grappled with the lack of access to water in the community and its environs.

While receiving the NGO into the community, representative of the Baale of Badeku, Prince Mathew Raji expressed appreciation to the team for thinking about the community and taking the decisive step to visit Badeku in spite of the bad roads and difficulty of accessibility, adding that the gesture was a demonstration of humanness and empathy.

The chief urged the team to support the community by spotlighting their difficulties so that the relevant authorities can take necessary action. Other spokespersons for the community including the Youth leader (Olori Odo Badeku), Chief Adeyemo Ramon decried the lack of government presence in Badeku and its surrounding communities. He said that it is desirable for the government to inch closer to the people, as they feel alone and left behind.

In their response, the Help Initiative team led by Aderonke Ige, a Nigeria-based lawyer and development advocate empathized with the community and assured them that the organisation would amplify the voice of the community in calling relevant attention to the needs of Badeku and other affected communities in Ona-Ara Local government.

The NGO proceeded to hold a special dialogue themed “The Woman and Her Water” with the women of Badeku, interrogating the gendered impact of the lack of access to water on the women and girls in the community. During the highly interactive and engaging session, the women spoke passionately about a range of challenges faced specifically by women, including poor menstrual hygiene, maternal health and cultural burden of domestic care work worsened by the lack of such resource as critical and essential as water.

According to the traditional head of women in the community, Iyalode, Chief Mrs. Moromoke Ajabi said that the lack of water in this community is especially burdensome for the women. “We are saddled with the responsibility of caring for the hygiene needs of our homes, including bathing the children, cooking, fetching water and so on. But how do you fetch the water that you do not see?”

According to Chief Olusola Oyedele, an astute educator and community leader, “Badeku used to have pipeborne water at about 15 years ago when we first sited our farms here: mainly poultry and piggery. But now, that is history.”

Chief Mrs. Oyedele narrated saddening experiences of children whom she encounters daily as the vice principal of a school. She said, “Some of these children, mostly girls, come to school tired and exhausted. You can tell that they have trekked long distances in search of water before coming to school. Once they get to school, fatigue sets in and they are not able to perform up to their natural abilities, neither are they able to assimilate. Most of the time, it leads to truancy, because they begin to run away from school, thinking they are dull and have no capacity for excellence or high performance. It is indeed a chain of saddening realities”, she concluded.

The “Otun Iyalode”, Madam Sikiratu Seb’otimo and Madam Bunmi Busari both narrated how lack of access to water, coupled with the unavailability of access road in Badeku community has resulted in notable losses for them and their businesses. Madam Busari, a cassava and palm farmer stressed that most of the time, after the planting season, they have to wait on rains to nurture their crops. According to the long-time agriculturist, when we manage to harvest, half of our produce go to waste because nobody wants to come to Badeku to buy produce, as there is no decent road. It is too risky for them to reach us and we do not have the resources to reach them, so we lose!”

Speaking on the distance the women and girls travel to fetch water, madam Mojirola Ogundipe said that the hardship faced by women in the community have become unbearable. She narrated how, during the rainy season, they make use of rain water for both drinking and other domestic needs. But once it is dry season, the challenge worsens. In her words, “Most women cover at least a kilometer or two to get drinking water from people who have dug wells, but for washing, bathing and house chores, there are flowing rivers up to 1 kilometer to the town”.

While responding to collective issues raised by the women, the team of Help initiative consisting of Olubunmi Eyelade, Adedayo Ige, Oluwanimilo Ola-Olorun, Olufunke Oyinlola, Marvelous Nwaogwugwu and Barrister Fola Awoyemi each shed light on different aspects of the engagement in the community, such as people-power building and the need for strategic engagement with the government. The team curated role plays, positioning the women for possible advocacy experiences.

Speaking to our correspondence after the event, Help Initiative forewarned that the government should not to fall into the trap of corporatization while attempting to solve the problem of water in Badeku, as that would be an eventual trap and a recipe for disaster, stressing that privatisation of public resources at the expense of the people has never yielded good fruits in any part of the world.

The group charged the government to look instead, into strengthening the public water sector towards effectiveness and productivity, promising to offer technical and strategic support to the government in designing a people-centered and democratic approach to solving the problem of water in Badeku community.

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