Ewurabena Yanyi-Akofur, Country Director of WaterAid Ghana says the country needs more effective actions to achieve sustainable Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) services by 2030.
Those actions, she noted, should be a shared responsibility for all stakeholders, including community members, Civil Society Organisations, the media, and the government.
In an interview with the Ghana News Agency to mark World Water Day, which is observed annually on March 22, Madam Yanyi-Akofur, said Ghana should be finding “ways and means” to achieve sustainable WASH by 2030.
“If we want to achieve sustainable WASH by 2030, we need to be finding the ways and means to go further, we cannot be going the same pace that we were going over the last five, ten or 20 years,” she said.
The WASH concept is used widely by non-governmental organisations and aid agencies in developing countries to provide access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene, which are critical to human health.
The purposes of providing access to WASH services include achieving public health gains, improving human dignity in the case of sanitation, implementing the human right to water and sanitation and improving education and health outcomes at schools and health facilities.
The immediate goal of the Ghana WASH Project is to improve access to safe and adequate water supply and basic sanitation facilities infrastructure for households, clinics, and schools and promote complementary hygiene practices to maximize the health impacts from those improved infrastructure.
The WaterAid Country Director stressed that providing infrastructure without the strengthening of systems would be counterproductive in Ghana’s quest to attain universal and sustainable WASH.
She emphasised the importance of multi-stakeholder collaboration to achieve the objectives set out by the WASH project
“So, the district-wide approach is what we seek to do, so we are going to model that in the Bongo district in the next five years. It is going to be our signature district for progressively working towards sustainable WASH in the next five years.
“The second critical thing we (WaterAid) are going to focus on in the next five years is how we strengthen the WASH systems when it comes to the health sector,” she disclosed.
Madam Yanyi-Akofur pointed out that WASH in health care facilities was critical to the delivery and quality service to patients.
She called on the Ghana Health Service to mobilize all affiliate institutions to promote sustainable hygiene behaviour and services within communities and health facilities “so that our health facilities are WASH compliant and meet the best and highest standards in providing health services.”
