Drastic measures needed to enforce sanitation laws - says Debrah
The Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Mr Julius Debrah, has said drastic measures are needed to stop the abuse of national and local bye-laws on good sanitation.
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He said landlords who did not have toilets in their homes should be held responsible for their inactions because it was a contributory factor to open defecation.
Mr Debrah made the remark in an address read on his behalf at a durbar to commemorate the 2014 World Toilet Day in Ho.
It was on the theme, “The impact of open defecation on the socio-economic development of Ghana.”
Mr Debrah said it was disheartening that a good proportion of people still defecated in the open.
Cost of open defecation
That, he said, coupled with the perennial floods in the cities and towns during the rains, increased diseases as faeces and other waste material were washed into water bodies and the environment.
According to him, available data suggested that only 15 per cent of Ghanaians had access to improved toilets while about 35 per cent of urban dwellers in the country patronised public toilets, with a whopping 23 per cent left to defecate in the open.
He said a World Bank country environmental analysis conducted on Ghana had revealed that the health costs resulting from poor water, sanitation and hygiene was the equivalent of 2.1 per cent of annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
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He also said it was estimated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that at least 8,000 deaths of children under five were caused by diarrhoea.
He announced that the ministry had rolled out a number of programmes, including the Community Led Total Sanitation, to ensure that people stopped open defecation and used toilets.
In an address, the Chief of WASH of UNICEF, Mr David Duncan, said the 2014 global monitoring report placed Ghana among the ten worst countries in the world which did not have access to toilets and that only one out of every seven had a toilet.
He said the World Bank had estimated in 2012 that it cost the nation $79 million every year in relation to open defecation, largely due to health impacts and loss of earnings due to people falling sick or dying.
Impact of open defecation
The acting Director of Environmental Health Sanitation Division (EHSD), Mr Naa Demedeme, said the linkage between socio economic factors and open defecation was not far-fetched and that the poor sanitation in the country was enormous .
The Ga Central Municipal Assembly in the Greater Accra Region marked the World Toilet Day with a route match in the municipality to create awareness of open defecation and proper personal hygiene.
Students from Abeka Motorway 1 and 2 Junior High School (JHS), Salvation Army JHS and the Chantan Experimental Primary School marched through Chantan with placards.
Some of the placards read, “Stop open defecation and stop cholera”, “We can’t wait while one billion people practice open defecation” and “Use toilet and stop cholera”.
Addressing the pupils and members of the community after the march, the Ga Central Municipal Education Director, Mrs Denise Diana Welbeck, appealed to the government to provide enough toilets and other hygienic facilities.
Mrs Welbeck urged the students to practice proper hand washing with soap and water which had 75 per cent chance of preventing the contraction of diseases such as cholera.