GHANA IS reportedly losing $290 million annually in the fight against poor sanitation across the country.
Minister of Sanitation and Water Resources, Cecilia Abena Dapaah, made this known to journalists on Tuesday in Accra, while citing a study done by the Water and Sanitation Programme of the World Bank.
The study, she says, found that the amount is equivalent to $12 per person per year in Ghana which translates to 1.6 percent of the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
She explained that “it makes a lot of economic sense to invest in sanitation; every Dollar invested in sanitation yields USD 5 dividends.”
Improvement
That notwithstanding, the Minister indicated that “sanitation services delivery in our cities have witnessed significant improvement in recent times.”
She added that “according to the 2019 report released by the Ministry of Monitoring and Evaluation, 75% of the solid waste generated in the urban centres is now properly managed.”
The strategies and measures adopted by the Ministry to improve on the sanitation situation in the country, she indicated, are guided by the vision of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s vision of making Accra the cleanest city in Africa.
She explained that “this vision is vigorously and vehemently being pursued by the Ministry in collaboration with the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs), the private service providers and the other stakeholders.”
She said the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources, in collaboration with the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development has stepped up its monitoring efforts to ensure enhanced service delivery by the MMDAs and members of the Environmental Services Providers Association (ESPA) within the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) in particular and across the whole country in general.
As part of the service monitoring mechanism, she indicated that the Ministry has introduced a system of performance monitoring and ranking to incentivize the MMDAs to up their game and also sanction non-performing agencies.
BY Melvin Tarlue