WaterAid Ghana, in collaboration with its stakeholders, has launched a five-year strategic campaign toward achieving safe water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH).
Dubbed ‘Climate Change, Water and Me’, the aim is to ensure healthy and dignified living while addressing the devastating effects of climate change in places that are prone to the menace in Ghana.
The campaign also aims at accentuating the correlation between climate change and WASH, as well as providing a platform for the organisation’s board of trustees and its partners to network.
Ewurabena Yanyi-Akofur, WaterAid Country Director, in her welcome address at the campaign’s launch in Accra indicated that her organisation is focusing on three key programmes in the next five years.
These include activating the citizens to participate in WASH provision sector activities while ensuring prioritisation of its issues in climate change conversations. “Urbanisation and population growth are the other core areas we are concentrating on in the next five years,” she added.
WaterAid Ghana’s Head of Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns, George Yorke, lamented the devastating effects of climate change on the country’s water-bodies, and its impact on sanitation and hygiene infrastructure.
While expressing the organisation’s commitment to improving WASH services in the country, he noted that: “This can only be done when we build resilient services in the very vulnerable communities being affected by climate change”.
He said although the campaign has a national focus, it will still need sub-national and community information to influence the national agenda.
He cited illegal mining, lack of political drive to provide services, inadequate funding and many others as other factors hindering efforts toward addressing the climate change menace.
“In the northern part of Ghana, for instance – where its impact is severely felt, if it’s not flood then it’s drought,” he further noted.
“The Sustainable Development Goals cannot be achieved without addressing the challenges of WASH. For people to have access to WASH, there is a need to help them have coping mechanisms that ensure resistance to climate change,” he noted.
Dr. Bob Manteaw, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability Studies, University of Ghana (UG), on his part noted that his outfit is willing to work with organisations such as WaterAid and similar bodies to address climate change and WASH challenges.
“We are committed to the course and path that WaterAid and its partners have taken, and we will always make ourselves available to contribute in any way that the organisation wants us to,” he added.
