Emmanuel Matthew Akpabio

Access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) services is essential for public health and sustainable development. In Cross River State, Nigeria, households continue to face challenges in accessing reliable and safely managed WaSH services. This study examined household WaSH access in Calabar Municipality, Ikom, and Ogoja, focusing on access patterns, service-related challenges, and community participation in WaSH governance. A cross-sectional household survey collected quantitative data on water sources and collection practices, storage, treatment, sanitation facilities, hygiene behaviours, and community involvement. Findings show that boreholes are the dominant water source; however, limited reliability compels households to make multiple daily trips, increasing time and labour burdens. Although most households use improved sanitation facilities, concerns remain regarding maintenance, safety for children/vulnerable groups, and wastewater disposal. Hygiene practices, including handwashing and water treatment, are constrained by material availability, perceived risks, and inconsistent service provision. Community participation is extensive through sanitation activities, maintenance, and peer education; yet, it often substitutes for limited government support rather than complementing it. Guided by multidimensional access, collective action, and political ecology frameworks, the study highlights the interaction between infrastructure, household behaviour, and governance, underscoring the need for integrated interventions aligned with Sustainable Development Goal 6/related equity-focused goals.

Yam (Dioscorea rotundata) is a major staple crop in West Africa and plays a central role in regional food security, rural livelihoods, and cultural identity. Its wide ecological adaptation, diverse maturity periods, and in-ground storage capacity make yams critical to seasonal food availability and resilience of smallholder farming systems. Despite its importance, existing yam research has largely emphasized biophysical and agronomic dimensions, with limited integration of the socio-cultural and ecological factors that shape yam-based food systems. This review addresses this gap by synthesizing interdisciplinary knowledge on yam food ecology, focusing on how socio-cultural values, beliefs, behaviours, and interactions influence production, utilization, and sustainability of yam systems. We examine the roles of culture, politics, power relations, gender dynamics, and community organization in structuring yam production and consumption across the West African yam belt. The review further explores the long-standing human–yam relationship and the implications of eroding traditional knowledge for future food system resilience. By adopting a systems and ecological perspective that integrates life and social sciences, this review provides a framework to inform sustainable yam crop improvement, value chain development, and inclusive policy interventions, thereby supporting long-term food security and rural development in West Africa.

This paper explores the socio-cultural and gender-based dynamics associated with place values, and their implications for women's access to water through case studies of upland and riverine communities in southern Nigeria. We used a range of fieldwork methods including public meetings, focus group discussions, in-depth interviews, keen observations, key informants and other secondary sources. Our findings show that drinking water sources are a part of the many forms of visible material structures that embody and generate automatic reproduction of gender-based beliefs, attitudes, feelings and practices. The outcome of such practices affects men and women differently in relation to access, workload and capacity for hygiene and other socio-economic practices. In discussing access to essential public goods, social and economic capacities take priority focus over the impact of ‘place values’ either as standalone or intersectional elements. Research should be expanded to incorporate these elements and their intersectional perspectives in shaping access to water.

Socio-cultural structures of yam production are largely shaped by the tradition, religion, beliefs, taboos, myths, spirituality and social relationships. Obudu community was the focus to examine the implications of these structures on yam productivity and sustainability. Data was collected through 60 interviews, 2 public meetings, 3 focus group discussions, local informants, review of literature, including secondary and grey literature and keen observation. Our findings reveal a range of indices of respondents’ perception as measures of productivity. The native and the ‘aged’ majority of the population were more conservative in their farming practice exhibiting deeper attachment to traditional practices and ecological wholesomeness with decreasing material productivity and performance in yield outputs, though not so significant. The socially mobile non-natives and the younger demographic groups were open to the modern farming approach targeting the quantity and tons of yam tubers and were not so keen on the overall health and integrity of the ecological system that makes sustainable production and human existence possible. The results emphasize the need to look beyond the improvement in material productivity as other non-material indices of productivity should be explored. More rigorous quantitative and long-term trend analysis should be conducted to assess the productivity performance trend associated with the natural ecological health and yam outputs for the study area.

Yam production, processing, distribution, and marketing processes are underpinned by socio-cultural beliefs shaped by ritual practices and indigenous wisdom. We used semi-structured interviews, public meetings, keen observation, local informants, and a review of secondary materials to assess local indigenous understanding of interconnected perspectives of yam farming processes, socio-cultural perspectives, and livelihood practices in communities in southern Nigeria. Our findings revealed that over 90% of farmers depend on experiences of adjusting to seasonal challenges, storage practices, and fertility enhancement. Cultural beliefs and spiritual practices pervade farmers’ social attitudes to improving farming operations. Almost 70% of yam producers are aged 60 years and above and depend on crude tools and traditional methods of land management and production process, even though the modern and innovative farming methods and practices are limited. Farmers respond to the poor public support system of extension services by informal networking and local associational relationships with diverse schemes to support and encourage members. Government and organizations should take advantage of these informal structures to empower farmers through micro-credits, education, information, training, supervision, and mechanization. Different groups of actors organized into formal social structures like cooperatives will take advantage of bulk buying, selling, transportation, access fundings, information, education, and training from public and non-governmental institutions. The study findings have demonstrated that the socio-economic structure of the Obudu community has developed extensively on account of decades of yam production and processing, supporting chains of a livelihood network, entrepreneurship, and relationships of mutual cooperation and co-existence.

This paper explores the extent to which Malawi’s national water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) sector programmes align with the lived realities of Malawian people through interviews, observations and a review of secondary documents. Significant progress is unquestionably being made, but there are dangers in momentary achievements being romanticized, and under-capacity in shaping cultural practices, investing and maintaining longevity and sustainability of available infrastructures. We argue that managing the sector towards statistical summaries serves to confound well-intentioned governance frameworks and compliance regimes ultimately leaving behind a large proportion of the population without access to basic drinking water or improved sanitation.

Improving access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) is at the core of the Global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, but achieving this goal depends on the extent to which policy decisions reflect local science and circumstances. We examine the extent to which the WaSH sector is coordinated in Nigeria through interviews, workshops and literature reviews. Findings demonstrate that WaSH related agencies pursue conflicting goals shaped by international agenda, preferences of donors as well as economic and political interests of actors. These and related factors limit the capacity for coordination, innovation and knowledge sharing for evidence-based and home-grown policies.

How much do slums affect women’s ability to negotiate access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH)? We used random narratives, interviews, and a review of literature from theoretical and secondary sources to capture the experiences of slum dwellers in South-South Nigeria. Our findings demonstrate that women and girls bear disproportionate burden and risk of poor and inadequate WaSH services in the course of domestic supplies and management and making tough choices in negotiating between personal sanitary needs of privacy and safety as well as attending to domestic hygiene, childcare and other chores. These lived realities and experiences are partly associated with gendered public policy practices, linked to the broader socio-cultural norm that confine women’s roles to the private/domestic spheres, while men are free to pursue higher aspirations and opportunities. Limited State capacity to guarantee universal access to WaSH for slum dwellers automatically shifts the responsibility for its provision to the private/domestic domain with women bearing the greater burden. We argue that the non-recognition of slums in official discourses limit their consideration for essential public services provision, and the implication of such neglect is discussed in the context of the consequences on women in the course of negotiating access to WaSH.

The practical challenges of achieving sustainable wetland agriculture in Nigeria are examined. Three wetland communities were studied with observations, meetings, focus groups, interviews, a workshop and a review of the literature. We find that the available wetlands are greatly under-utilized due to meteorological and climate-related challenges, poor human capacities, absence of science–policy collaboration, complex land tenure regimes and a lack of supportive infrastructure. Climate change impact manifests in either excessive seasonal flooding or prolonged drought, with consequences for livelihoods. Improving the utilization and productivity of the wetlands will require strong public policies, appropriate investment, human capacity building, science–policy–society cooperation and supportive infrastructure.

Groundwater exploitation is an essential aspect of the numerous processes of transforming the urban natural environment for human gains. We use the political ecology of borehole exploitation in Nigeria’s urban environment to understand the micro-and macro-level processes mediating the transformation and changes in urban “groundwater scape”. The fieldwork processes depend on field counting of borehole distribution, in-depth and semi-structured interviews, and a review of secondary literatures. We argue that the social and environmental changes arising from the exploitation of groundwater bespeak the active and continual manifestation of the interplay of combustible interests and power friction among institutional agents within the permissible range of the natural environment. Such dynamic power relations engender a pattern of socio-natural transformation consistent with Swyngedouw’s notion of urban metabolism- “a series of interconnected heterogeneous and dynamic but contested and contestable processes of continuous quantitative and qualitative transformations that re-arranges humans and non-humans in new and often unexpected ways”.