GHANA TO REVISE SWA COMPACT-EHSD BOSS

GHANA TO REVISE SWA COMPACT-EHSD BOSS

The Acting Director of the Environmental Health and Sanitation Directorate of the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, Naa Lenason Demedeme, says that the 2010 Ghana Compact signed in Washington will be revised, if Ghana really means to attain her 54 per cent Millennium Development goal for sanitation and hygiene by 2015.

Speaking exclusively to the Ghana Water and Sanitation Journalists Network,GWJN, Mr Dememdeme noted that  the nebulous nature of  crucial sections of the Ghana Compact makes it extremely difficult to track  the level of funding into the sanitation and water sector.

At the first Sanitation and Water for All (SWA) High Level Meeting(HLM) in Washington in April 2010, Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Dr Kwabena Duffuor, pledged that Ghana will ‘spend up to USD 200 million annually from now up to 2015… make additional outlays of USD 150 million annually towards improving environmental sanitation … and an additional commitment of USD 50 million annually to reinforce hygiene education.’

But development partners, DPs, and civil society organisations such as GWJN  have questioned government’s commitment to this pact, considering that just 14 per cent of Ghanaians  use improved sanitation facilities, while an estimated five million Ghanaians defecate in rivers, gutters and bushes each day.

According to report by international aid agency, WaterAid, ‘Ghana is one of 57 countries currently most off-track to meet its sanitation MDG target. On current trends, Ghana is due to halve the proportion of people lacking sanitation by 2123, missing the MDG sanitation target by 108 years.’ 

No wonder that the capital, Accra, other cities and towns have been hit by several bouts of deadly cholera outbreak over the  years..  

Asked how much of the USD 400 million annual pledge had come into the sanitation sector, Mr Demedeme said, ‘I don’t have the exact figures, but government has made available what it can afford.’

At the second HLM this year, Ghana reported that it met 46 per cent of its 2010 commitment and 70 per cent of its 2011 commitment to the WASH sector, but no concrete details have so far been released.

Mr Demedeme stressed that government was doing what it could, it would always have to rely on multi-donor budget support. He added that in some years up to 70 per cent of the budget for water and sanitation services came from donors.

‘The Ghana compact is not too clear about the exact roles and responsibilities of the partners in the framework,’ says Mr Demedeme .

 ‘We should be able to look at the compact again because the compact indicates that the Ghana government in partnership with development partners .And if you want government alone to shoulder the USD 350 million  bill for the sector each year, then we have a problem.’ If government contracts loans, are they part of the compact commitment?, he quizzed.

Naa Demedeme added that ‘In the next couple of days, we’ll start the process of revising the compact to get a lot of things clearer. Civil society will be involved in the revision that will clearly delineate what the responsibility of government is and what role DPs should play.’

 On why Ghana is woefully off track when it comes to sanitation coverage, this is what Naa Demedeme said:

‘The underlying issue has been low investment. If you compare the investment in the water sector to the investment in the sanitation sector, it is now surprising that the water sector has made significant progress. Water they say is life. If you go to any community and prioritise their needs, water comes first before sanitation.’

‘Donors themselves,’ he added ‘when coming with some investment in water and sanitation, the budget for sanitation is always an afterthought, normally around five or ten per cent.’

He however indicated that the situation is changing as most of the new donor budgets that have come split the investment equally for water and sanitation.

Mr Demedeme cited the most recent European investment bank,EIB, facility which has split the investment equally for water and sanitation.

CWSA GOES HIGH-TECH.

CWSA GOES HIGH-TECH?

What do mobile telephony and water, sanitation and hygiene (or WASH,) have in common?

The answer lies with Ghana’s rural and small-town water and sanitation provider, the Community Water and Sanitation Agency, CWSA. The Agency has piloted cutting edge technology that will enable CWSA get real time data on which of its pumps, mechanised boreholes or water systems is providing the desired services to the people.

Anyone who is familiar with how data is collected, stored, analysed and disseminated in Ghana will admit that it is a nightmare. This has led to charges that figures, including annual  inflation figures, ‘are cooked’ because Ghana lacks evidence-based research .It would be recalled that Enoch T. Mensah, one time Minister for Employment and Social Welfare stunned ,  and indeed appalled many, when he admitted that Ghana had no figures on unemployment. The same is true in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector, with different players giving different figures for the number of people who have access to water, for instance.

Indeed, many are not convinced that Ghana has met her MDG target for water, as day in day out, large numbers of Ghanaians are seen carrying the now infamous yellow ‘Kufuor gallons’, desperately looking for water for their daily chores. Records show that at any given time, up to 30% of boreholes across the country are down.

 According to Jeremiah Atengdem,Northern Regional Learning Facilitator of  Sustainable Services at Scale, otherwise known as Triple-S, ‘In the Akasti District of the Volta Region, one of the three districts in which the survey was carried out, ‘The data that was collected enables you to ascertain the facilities in the district that are functional. As you can see there, the functionality situation in the district is about 67%. And also 69% of the facilities are not reliable…CWSA  standards say the facilities should work  about 95% of the time.’

The results of this survey showed that of the 249 water point sources in the Akatsi district, only 48 of them, representing 20% were functioning as they should.

Well, CWSA, the agency in charge of facilitating the provision of WASH services in rural areas and small towns has decided to end this challenge in their data collection and management system.

Benedict Kubabom, the Director for Planning and Investment at CWSA says it is no longer useful to count pipes and pumps to determine whether people have access to water or not. If CWSA really has to ensure sustainable WASH services, then it must move from the current un-structured, ad-hoc data gathering, storage, analysis and dissemination processes.

Benedict Kubabom states emphatically,‘Our position is that continuous investment in new WASH facilities, without reference to the already existing ones, is not the right way to go. CWSA’s position is to grant equal attention, if not more, to the monitoring of functionality and sustainability of WASH systems with guaranteed continuous service. And to take corrective measures based on the monitoring reports as carried out by the various WSMTs and service authorities. So CWSA is calling for all hands on deck to ensure that happens.’

The Chief Executive Officer of the CWSA, Clement Bugase, lamented that past projects have often come with their own monitoring tools, many of which were deficient. This resulted in a situation where piped systems and boreholes which had completely broken down for long periods, would be counted as providing service.

Speaking at a stakeholder workshop, Clement Bugase said ‘Most of you are aware of our history, some of the difficulties, especially when after a particular project has ended, the tools and framework that were used for that project die with that project. So, we decided that we needed to develop our own tools, get our own framework to be able to monitor throughout the sector, a framework that will cover any project that comes. That was when the DiMES was developed as a software monitoring tool. The tool has worked well for us up till now. And as and when we have the resources and are able to deploy it at the regional and district levels, we’ve been able to gather data, analyse it and report, though there are limitations as at now.’

He called on all WASH sector stakeholders, especially Development Partners, to buy into the Smarter-WASH project, which uses SMS to report on the state of water facilities. This, he noted, is the surest way of tracking functionality and providing more satisfactory and better access to water for the people.