Cecelia Dapaah and Bruce Gordon, WHO with the WASH Strategy and Round II Report
Ministers of Water Resources & Sanitation in the World Health Organisation Africa Region (WHO-AFRO) have held a three-day meeting in Accra to deliberate ways to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, which calls for clean water and sanitation for all.
The high level meeting brought together participants to discuss best practices in the regional efforts in achieving SDG 6 and to launch the WASH Strategy and Round II Reports.
The conference was themed: ‘Achieving SDG 6 and Safe Water For All: A Focus On Water Treatment & WASH in Healthcare Facilities’.
The Minister of Sanitation & Water Resources, Cecelia Dapaah, highlighted the need for Africa to focus on achieving local sustainability so that communities could successfully own, support and maintain their water systems to ensure quality drinking water.
“We need to support community structures with the required technical know-how and get them to be committed to achieving adequate and safe water for all to improve on their health and economic well-being,” she added.
Madam Dapaah pointed out that Ghana has made significant progress by increasing access to improved water supply to about 80 per cent of the population, in addition to eliminating Guinea worm.
However, the minister said in spite of those successes, about 4,000 Ghanaian children still die annually from diarrhoea and an additional 23 per cent suffer from stunted growth and chronic malnutrition, which are linked to unsafe water and poor sanitation.
The sector minister stated that government recognises that access to safe drinking water is a basic human right and essential to protecting public health, hence the efforts to ensure all Ghanaians have access to safe water.
She also called on colleague ministers of sanitation and health to make frantic efforts to prioritise issues of SDG-6 in their various countries.
Madam Dapaah urged them to put in place local roadmaps towards achieving them because “we cannot afford to fail our people in this regard.”
The WHO Country Representative, Dr. Owen Kaluwa, said lack of access to safe water and adequate sanitation is one of the significant environmental risk factors to health.
He said the WHO was, therefore, working strategically to improve health through better water, sanitation and hygiene.”We need to form effective partnerships in the work we have to do together to improve on water and sanitation,” he added.
The Acting Chief Director of Ministry of Health (MoH), Nana Adjei Mensah, said contaminated water is a risk factor for diseases such as diarrhoea and cholera.
He said the MoH, in collaboration with related ministries and agencies, has made some strides in improving WASH services in health facilities to enhance the overall quality of clinical service.
He said the ministry has also collaborated with UNICEF to initiate projects, with an overall objective of developing a national strategy for WASH in healthcare facilities.
He envisaged that the implementation of the project would contribute to quality of care and enhance infection prevention.
The Chief of WASH, UNICEF-Ghana, David Duncan, said although every three out of five Ghanaian drink contaminated water, a third of the contamination happens after collection from the source.
“Despite this household water treatment rate are so low as to be almost non-existent and increasing only very slowly. Yet the demand for safe water is so strong that the fastest growing trend in water supplies is sachet water which is used in every three out of 10 households,” he disclosed.
He urged participants to use the conference to explore ways to help engage people to safely manage water.
By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri