  The fear of the invisible but prevalent Coronavirus (COVID-19), disease
cannot be overemphasized since there is the potential possibility of it wiping
out the entire world population within a few months if adequate and quick steps
are not taken to curb this menace, and the sub-Saharan African (SSAn) region is
no exception. It is evident that water, as an essential daily commodity, has
long been in a state of emergency in SSAn nations, which is largely attributed
to decades of neglect by the successive governments, because it has not been
possible to separate the existing bond between water, health, livelihood and
the economy. The laudable Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) proposed by the
United Nations had yet to achieve the stated objective of improving the
standards of living and health conditions of the rural communities in the SSAn
region before the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. This failure has been masked by a
sort of delusion in which the people of this region are subjected to the
hardship of searching for clean and healthy water in their own ponds, rivers,
streams and shallow hand-dug local wells on a continuous basis. Less than 17%
of the rural population in all the SSAn communities can access basic
hand-washing facilities and sanitation systems. The total water productivity,
as measured by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per cubic meter of total
freshwater withdrawn, for the people was less than 5 GDP.
