The Coalition of NGOs in Water and Sanitation (CONIWAS) wishes to announce for the information of prospective participants that the Mole XXIV Conference Registration is now open & the conference details are as follows:
Theme:
''Building Effective Partnership for Scaling-Up Sustainable Sanitation Services in Ghana"
Plan Ghana, an international child-centred community development organisation, has taken steps to improve on sanitation in the Upper Manya Krobo District to ensure that the people live in a clean environment.
To that end, it has put up a 'sanitation market' at Asasehene in the district, where different types of KVIPs have been constructed to serve the people.
The United Nations General Assembly has passed a resolution [1] on 24 July 2013, proposed by the Government of Singapore on "Sanitation for All" and the establishment of November 19th as World Toilet Day [2]. Adopted by consensus, the resolution was co-sponsored by more than 100 countries [3].
The amusement and laughter likely to follow the designation of 19 November as “World Toilet Day” would all be worthwhile if people’s attention was drawn to the fact that 2.5 billion people lacked proper sanitation and 1.1 billion were forced to defecate in the open, Singapore charge d'affaires Mark Neo told the General Assembly [4].
Disasters, both natural and man-made, are a common phenomenon the world over, some of which escalate into emergencies as a result of their magnitude.
However, despite their unpredictability sometimes, the absence of a plan to deal with incidents and natural occurrences such as floods, earthquakes, civil strife and wars as well as fire outbreaks as has been experienced in Ghana lately, always has the propensity to aggravate an already bad situation
The Government of Ghana has been asked as a key measure of improving access to water, to disseminate the water policy to the majority of Ghanaians, to enhance implementation of the policy.
Head of Policy and Partnership at WaterAid Ghana, Mr Ibrahim Musah, said policy distribution or dissemination by translating it into local languages for the citizenry to understand has not been done.
“Why bother about WASH technologies? Current discourse is on sustainable service delivery monitoring and governance. Many WASH technologies, such as the India Mark II handpump and the VIP latrine, were successfully adopted and have improved the lives of millions. However, not all promising WASH technologies invented or introduced have provided sustainable services. And most technology does not function all of the time. These are lost opportunities..”. André Olschewski of the Skat Foundation wrote this in his blog post TAF & TIP: Why bother about technologies?.
This workshop targets sanitation practitioners that have hands-on experience with the implementation of Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) programmes and projects and aims to bring together professionals working on rural sanitation in West Africa, particularly practitioners, researchers, policy makers, and people from government agencies, donors and media.
The Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA) has piloted a cutting edge technology that will enable it get real time data on which of its pumps, mechanised boreholes or water systems is providing the desired services to the people of Ghana.
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.
Though corruption and the issue of integrity in institutions and among individuals have existed over the years, they have often been spoken of with muffled voices.While people are quick to admit in private that corruption pervades the air, those same people are unwilling to publicly admit that it is an issue that seriously hampers the delivery of services and when in public speak about it with a hush.The reason is that many see it as a very sensitive and delicate issue to be spoken of in public, lest one loses favour with the powers that be or is blacklisted in the award of contracts or be branded as cowards, not being smart, anti-social and ‘enemies of progress’.
