As people across the globe marked World Cleanup Day yesterday,  members of the Cleaning Practitioners Association of Nigeria,  have  underscored the need to put the cleaning and the hygiene sector on the  centre stage to reduce morbidity and mortality rate in the country especially among the children.

According to  the National President, Dr Tunde Ayeye: “If the environment is dirty, it affects all of us and we can see it in the number of our young people  that are dying. One of the reasons why we believe that the cleaning and the hygiene sector needs to take a little bit more of the centre stage is that it is a lot cheaper to keep our environment clean and avoid  children from falling sick, being out of school because of sick days or  even dying because of communicable diseases.

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“This   is just by ensuring that every day is world cleanup day, ensuring that your personal space is clean and ensuring that the immediate perimeter of your space is clean. If we are all committed to that as citizens, then we also might as well have something to hold our government more accountable to irrespective of whatever efforts they are making, we can demand a little bit more working as partners with them.”

Regretting that the sector is often overlooked by the government, he said: “Our advocacy to the government is, please pay a bit more attention to this sector so  that we can develop it.”

The three things we want to do are to professionalise, to standardise and to regulate. We can have the support of existing government structures and extend those structures both at the sovereign and sub-sovereign levels, such that it becomes a profession and the people that we employ can earn a living wage because the quality of their output would be better.

“If government supports us,  we would be able to build our own equipment locally, we would be able to manufacture a little bit more of  our chemicals- many of these are currently being  imported. We can do it here and deepen and strengthen that value chain.”