This paper compares analyses of water quality in Nigeria presented in the academic literature with that reported by
the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and United Nations International
Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) in the Rapid Assessment of Drinking Water Quality (RADWQ) programme.
Bibliographic and grey literature databases were used to identify studies of microbial and physicochemical water
quality in Nigeria. We screened 521 study abstracts and identified 90 relevant studies based on 11,648 water
samples. For each relevant study, we recorded the number of water samples, the location/hydrological areas and the
water source that was analysed. The percentage compliance for the academic literature with the WHO guideline for
each of these parameters was obtained and compared to the RADWQs result. We then analysed these results with the
same method used for the RADWQ report to compare results from both studies. We found little variation in
physicochemical results between the two studies, but a large difference between the identified microbial properties.
The overall national average compliance with the WHO guideline value for the academic literature is 53.37%, while
that for RADWQ project was 73%. These disparities could be attributed to the huge difference in the total number of
water samples analysed, the high level of contamination in the water samples and most notably, the nonrepresentativeness
of the water samples in the hydrological areas.