NCCE partners Graphic to run clean Accra campaign

The Accra Metro Office of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) is to partner the Graphic Communications Group Limited (GCCL) to embark on a clean-up campaign in Accra.

The GCGL will offer free publicity on the campaign, christened “Keep Accra Clean,” to create public awareness and garner goodwill to sustain the initiative.

The campaign, scheduled to start on November 2, 2018, will initially focus on mobilising stakeholders, traders, market women, schoolchildren and other members of the general public, to clean areas at Kaneshie, Agbogbloshie and the Kwame Nkrumah Interchange.

In pursuit of the partnership, some officials of the Accra Metro office of the NCCE, led by its Resource Person, Mr Ben Victor Avadu, and the acting Director of the NCCE Accra District, Ms Constance Effah, paid a courtesy call on the acting Director of Newspapers of the GCGL, Mrs Mavis Kitcher, at the head office of the company last Friday.

Shared responsibility

Giving details of the initiative, Mr Avadu said the clean-up exercise would be carried out fortnightly.

He said as part of its civic mandate, the commission needed to take education on sanitation seriously, since the sanitation situation in the country, particularly in the national capital, Accra, was not the best.

He said it was for such reason that the President set up the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources and called on all members of the public to help make the vision of clean cities and towns in the country a reality.

Mr Avadu said sanitation in most parts of the country left much to be desired, the reason for which the commission had decided to engage in a pre-Christmas sanitation education programme in the last quarter of 2018, saying that, “we cannot celebrate Christmas in a filthy environment.”

Lack of funding

He said because the lack of funding and logistics was the major challenge to implementing the exercise, the NCCE had decided to also partner the Zoomlion Ghana, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly and other institutions.

Free publicity

Responding, Mrs Kitcher commended the NCCE for seeking a partnership with the GCGL to help achieve the goal of ridding Accra of filth.

She expressed concern about the inclination of some people to neglect their responsibility to keep their surroundings clean.

“People complain that there are no dustbins in the communities but even where they are, these collection bins pile up and spill over and nobody picks them.

“What we need to do as citizens is to play our part, and the metropolitan assemblies have to ensure that when these dustbins are full, they are picked and emptied to discourage people from dropping garbage on the ground,” she said.

Mrs Kitcher said the media could play a major role to help educate the public and sustain the campaign, adding that, “for our part, we are willing to support you to sustain the campaign since we do not want diseases in our communities.

“As a state organisation, we want to support other state institutions that are working to achieve results; so do not stop midway,” she urged the NCCE, and asked the commission to set targets that it could achieve.