The need

Water

More than nine million people have no access to safe drinking water in Ghana. In many rural communities, water, which constitutes about 70% of the human body according to scientists, is one of the scarcest commodities. During the wet season, unsafe sources of water get more contaminated by run off water from polluted sites. In the dry season, even contaminated water becomes scarce since the streams usually dry up.

This compels especially women and children to walk over long distances to look for water for all domestic chores including drinking.

They usually carry very big pans and containers to enable them carry as much water as possible. The heavy load on their heads, the long distance to walk, and other chores to perform during the day compound their already fragile health problems and reduces their productivity. In the cities and small towns too the situation, though generally better than the rural areas, there are many communities whose water problems are simply alarming.

Our cities tend to develop ahead of planning. Many new sites are therefore not connected to the water network for decades. Communities with the worst picture are those slums inhabited mainly by squatters. They are not even legally recognized as communities by the municipal or metropolitan authorities, let alone possess the right to water facilities. Water related diseases are therefore very prevalent in these slums. Nevertheless these are human beings by all standards who need to live like others.

WaterAid Ghana therefore feels the urgent need to intervene to restore to these deprived masses some hope by supporting them to access potable water. This we do through identifying local partners who are located inside or closer to these poor communities and supporting them to deliver quality water provision services to our target communities.

Sanitation

In many poor rural and urban communities in Ghana, people have no access to decent places of convenience. Especially in northern Ghana, there exist hundreds of communities without any form of latrines at all. In fact only about eleven percent of rural dwellers in Ghana have access to adequate sanitation facilities.

People are obliged to practice open defecation in these communities since they have no option. This unhygienic practice comes with a number of diseases.

I northern Ghana during the dry season, there are areas where people, especially women, have to walk for a few kilometres before they can even get an obscure place to ease themselves. This is due to the lacking of vegetation and topography of the area.

WaterAid - Ghana feels the need to contribute to solving the sanitation problem in Ghana. We support the promotion, the construction, and use of household latrines in poor communities. We support the promotion and the adoption of affordable latrine technology options to lessen the financial and the efforts needed to own household latrines. We encourage the use of materials available within the community we enter. We then support the provision of those necessary materials and other resources that the community cannot afford.

Diseases

There are so many water and sanitation related diseases prevalent in Ghana. At the moment, Ghana ranks second worldwide in guinea worm cases. The Northern Region alone, as at October 2002 represented more than 70% of Ghana's total guinea worm cases that year. Nationwide, there were 4,101 reported cases. Other water and sanitation related diseases include diarrhoea, trachoma, cholera, hepatitis A, bilharzias, typhoid, malaria, polio, hookworm, and tapeworm.

This calls for urgent interventions from government and civil society organisations to help reduce, if not eradicate, some of these diseases. WaterAid - Ghana therefore seeks to contribute to the global and national efforts at solving this problem through partnership with local NGO's and other development partners to support the provision of safe water and good sanitation, and the promotion of safe hygiene practices in poor communities.

Hygiene Promotion

Many Ghanaians seem ignorant of the effects of bad hygiene practices on their own health. People defy many simple preventive health practices and later find themselves victims of their own ignorance. People do not wash their hands before eating or after visiting the latrine; people defecate in the open close to their own residence; People throw refuse in open drains; people do not store their drinking water in clean containers etc. Ghana's health authorities have said that about 80% of diseases in the country are preventable since they are caused mainly by high-risk hygiene behaviours and bad eating habits.

You would not like to blame some of them - in fact majority of them - for the simple reason that "they do not know what they are doing."

There is therefore the need to promote safe hygiene behaviour in the communities. WaterAid - Ghana, through her partners, contributes to solving this health problem by adopting an integrated water, sanitation and hygiene promotion approach. By this approach, any community that benefits from our water provision services also benefits from sanitation and hygiene promotion services to enable them maximize the health benefits of these services.

In hygiene promotion, our partners spend more time on discussing with communities, the health implications of some of their traditional behaviours and practices. They also train some of the community members to also train and monitor the hygiene behaviours of their own people.

Advocacy

The water and sanitation problem in Ghana may not only have been caused by lack of facilities. Public policies and decisions may sometimes create or compound the problem. Some policies and decisions can easily deny the voiceless poor access to potable water and effective sanitation. For instance if the government decides to allocate only one percent of the budget to the water and sanitation sector, millions of Ghanaians may have to be in the queue for years before they are provided with potable water and effective sanitation facilities.

The national policy on the five percent community upfront cash contribution to the capital cost of water facilities, for instance, has been criticized by many civil society organisations. Their claim is that it denies the poor communities of access to good drinking water since many of them cannot afford.

The government decision to allow private sector participation in water service delivery in Ghana has also been described by some critics of the decision as "commoditisation" of water, a basic necessity of life. The fear is that the private businessman would be more inclined to maximize profit and may achieve that by denying the poor consumer of his right to cheap and constant flow of potable water.

The need to influence some policies and decisions on behalf of the voiceless is very high. Decision and policy-makers mostly are not on the ground to be properly informed of the impacts of their decisions on the poor communities. It is therefore imperative on the part of the organisations on the ground that are well informed to debate the authorities to come out with decisions that will contribute positively to solving the national water and sanitation problem.

WaterAid - Ghana therefore contributes actively to decision making both at the national and district levels. This we do by either personally getting involved in the debates or supporting our partners to do it. Again we also create or support forums for debates on some of such issues.

Gender Mainstreaming

The various roles that different sexes play in the management of water and sanitation resources can impact either positively or negatively on the health benefits they derive from, or on the sustainability of, those facilities. Sex induced biases in community decision-making and gatherings for hygiene promotion services for instance may also nullify the efficiency of the exercise.

WaterAid - Ghana therefore encourages and supports its partners to mainstream gender considerations in every activity they perform within the communities.