Vital Registration and Sustainable Urban Waste Management in Nigeria

Globally, rapid urbanization, population growth and industrial expansion in the cities have outpaced the capacity of the local authorities to manage waste effectively, resulting in widespread adoption of unsanitary disposal patterns. Many cities in Africa including Nigeria, are facing serious challenges in terms of urban waste management. Several policies and programmes with huge budgetary allocations have been experimented but with minimum success. The reason for the dismal performance of most waste management programmes resulted from the inability of the concerned agencies to bridge the missing link – the dynamic of waste generation in terms of the spatial variation and the changes in the direction of flow. Vital registration, the registration of births, deaths, marriages and migration has a long history, however, its application has not been fully utilized. If vital registration is reasonably accurate, it is possible to obtain a picture of the changes in the structure of the population which can provide a platform for forecasting of sources and potential volume of urban waste. This is achievable through data gathering and monitoring of urban population drift and household dynamics. This paper provides a broad insight into how data gathering through vital registration can improve urban waste management efforts in Africa especially in Nigeria where waste management is essentially handled by government agencies. Keywords: Vital registration, Waste management, Urbanization, Sustainability, Nigeria.