By Yaw
Ansah, GNA
Accra,
Aug. 8, GNA – Lack of strong political leadership and weak law enforcement have
been identified as the main obstacles hindering the country’s quest to solve
the sanitation problem.
At a public lecture on sanitation organised by
Medialink in Accra on Wednesday, the panellist and audience also cited the
complex nature of sanitation institutional management and called on government
to crack the whip to address the challenges.
The forum unanimously agreed that the
president should make sanitation a priority when evaluating the various local
metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives.
Speaking on the topic “Unlocking Ghana’s
Sanitation Puzzle: Form Policy to Implementation,” Professor Chris Gordon,
Director of the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies at the
University of Ghana, Legon, called for a holistic approach in order to prevent
the effects of sanitation.
He said, without state support to deal with
sanitation challenges forcefully, the President Akufo-Addo administration’s
vision to make Ghana’s capital, Accra, the cleanest city in Africa by the end
of his first term would not be achieved.
Prof. Gordon said no one was insulated from
sanitation threats adding that there was the need to coil the impunity,
immorality, pride, envy, and greed.
He called on stakeholders to build synergies,
find novel ways of adding value to the waste generated and educate the public
especially the youth to change their perception that shit business was a
serious business.
Mr. Sagane Thiaw, Operations Director, World
Vision International, reiterated that Water, Sanitation and Hygiene had always
been our ministry’s core priority.
He said the organisation’s campaign had been
able to deliver 207 Open Defecation Free (ODF) communities, provided 63 gender
and disability friendly institutional latrines with changing rooms for
menstrual hygiene management and capacity building for 85 latrine artisans.
Working together with stakeholders he said, 25
Municipal and District Assemblies officers had received training in their
respective capacities built especially in the implementation of the
Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach.
Mr Thiaw urged government to pay more
attention to issues of sanitation in order to save children and the good people
of this country from avoidable ailments and deaths, poverty and the shame
associated with being one of the poorest countries in terms of basic
sanitation.
“It is unacceptable that only 15 per cent of
the Ghanaian population has access to improved sanitation, 19 per cent
practicing Open Defecation, 59 per cent sharing latrines, while over 58 per
cent of solid waste is either crudely or indiscriminately disposed of and 2 per
cent of all waste generated in Ghana is effectively recycled.
He said the statistics had negative
consequences for the health and wellbeing of our society and requires urgent
attention.
“World Vision has decided to further
prioritise sanitation by giving it a lot more attention, allocating increased
resources, building adequate capacity and establishing strategic partnerships
with governments and it allied agencies as well as none state actors to deliver
improved sanitation and hygiene services”.
GNA