Evaluation of Access to Drinking Water Sources in Port Harcourt, Rivers State

Quality drinking water is a prime necessity of life and access to it is very important in the life of humans. Unfortunately, there is no potable water in the lexicon of governance in Rivers State hence this study to investigate access to quality drinking water sources in Port Harcourt (PH) City LGA and make recommendations. To achieve this, a total of 320 questionnaires to households in 20 defined stations in PH City LGA to randomly sample their opinions on the subject matter. At the end, 305 entries that were validly was rated with a 4-point Likert’s scale and ranked with Relative importance Index (RII) using frequency for the most accessed sources while Cronbach’s alpha was used for reliability. A hypothesis for the significance of the proportion of respondents that access the source was also tested with t-statistics. Results revealed that, out of the 10 sources of water investigated, borehole, ranked 1st with 78.69% as the most accessed drinking water source, followed by sachet (62.17%), bottled (37.7%), harvested rain (33.77%) and Municipal potable waters (12.17%) in 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th positions while river and pond ranked 9th (0.98%) and 10th (0.98%) indicating that they are not accessed. The influencing factors for accessibility are; Cost, Quality and Availability. Also, the proportions of respondents that access the sources tested are all significant. The internal consistency of the data is 0.88. In conclusion, municipal potable water is not accessible in PH City LGA for over 32 years now hence the residents resorted to available sources whose qualities are not guaranteed. Rehabilitation of existing water infrastructures (10 stations) of The Port Harcourt Water Corporation (PHWC) and building of new stations, resuscitation of the New Water Board Law in 2012 and partnership with international Agencies such as USAID and UNESCO by Rivers State Government to provide adequate potable water for the resident of PH City are amongst the recommendations made.