Dignitaries at the press conference
According to the 2017 Education Management Information System (EMIS) report of the Ghana Education Service (GES), out of 21,438 public basic schools in Ghana, 35 percent have no toilet facilities.
This represents more than 7,400 public schools and an estimated two million pupils affected in the schools.
Out of 9,064 private basic schools sampled, 1,631 did not have toilet facilities, meaning an estimated 430,000 pupils in those private schools also defecate outside a toilet facility during school hours.
The Coalition of NGOs in Water & Sanitation (CONIWAS) has, therefore, given the government by the end of 2020 to ensure every school in Ghana has access to a clean hygienic toilet facility.
Speaking at a press conference by the coalition on the theme: ‘The Perennial Lack of Toilet Facilities In Schools In Ghana’, Attah Arhin, the vice chair of the coalition, indicated that report by the GES implied that about two million Ghanaian children are compelled to resort to defecating in unorthodox open spaces mostly within the immediate surrounding of their schools.
He said that the practice leads to infections such as intestinal worms, diarrhoea, cholera, malnutrition and stunting among schoolchildren.
According to the coalition, in a 2013/2014 EMIS report generated by the GES, 69 percent of all basic schools both public and private had access to toilet. However, in 2017, the percentage had only increased by one percent.
“While access to toilet in public schools increased by five percent, that of private basic schools reduced by two percent, meaning that there were new private schools that had been built without toilet facilities within the period,” he explained.
“If the trend of one percent improvement in five years should continue, it will take Ghana 150 more years for all basic schools to have access to have access to improved toilet facilities,” Mr. Arhin added.
The coalition also revealed that a research by one Prof. Kwabena Nyarko and Dr. Eugene Appiah Effah of the Department of Engineering at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology (KNUST) found that Ghana needs only u$420 million to provide decent toilets to all public basic schools in Ghana.
Abigail Owiredu-Boateng