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.