Story: Franklin ASARE-DONKOH
The Country Representative for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to Ghana, Mr. Daniel Mumuni, has hinted that his organisation wants to ensure there is Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) for everyone, not just a handful.
According to him, ensuring that there is WASH for everyone anywhere is a huge task that CRS as stakeholders or the government alone cannot deliver on that mandate, thus it requires the support of all stakeholders so as to have a Ghana that has water access to everybody not only in terms of adequacy but that is safe, is affordable, is reliable, and is sustainable.
Mr. Mumuni made this known when addressing participants at the 95th edition of the National Level Learning Alliance (NALLAP), held at the Coconut Groove Hotel in Accra.
CRS’s country representative explained that ensuring safe water, sanitation, and hygiene is now more important than ever in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Goal six.
SDGs), Goal six, which is a globally shared vision, behoves the government and local authorities to take the lead in coordinating efforts of all the stakeholders in the WASH sector, including CRS to implement solutions from a city-wide point of view to an extensive planning and collective action.
Sharing his overview of the two projects supported, the “Citywide Inclusive Sanitation Plan for the Sagnerigu Municipal Assembly 2022-2025 and Citywide Inclusive Sanitation Plan for the Tamale Metropolitan Assembly”.
Mr. Mumuni told the gathering that what he liked about the two projects was the costing elements of the projects and programmer because, more often than not, organisations come up with very elaborate plans that are not costed, so no one gets to know at first hand the financial burden associated with them.
“And what happens is that it remains on the shelf because nobody dares to look at this anymore. So by this establishment, MMDAs are mandated to plan, budget, and implement interventions to improve the lives of their own people in accordance with local priorities and guidelines provided by the National Development Planning Commission, and the Ministry of Finance.
And let me say this is also very important as we talk about the ownership of these processes that were putting the MMDAs ahead and what I also like about this approach is that we are not coming up with any new structures but we are leveraging on existing processes.
As such they are required to prepare medium-term plans and we know that many districts are doing these annual action plans and composite budgets highlighting prioritised interventions and budgetary implications. These documents are usually prepared not at the right time,” he noted.
According to him, even though CRS facilitated the creation of the Sagnerigu Municipal and the Tamale Metropolitan Assemblies Citywide Inclusive Sanitation Plan, the two local authorities took lead in developing it, and it is quite recent.
“I think yesterday I was looking at an email that my team was exchanging with another organisation who was expressing how unique it was that a development organisation is able to come up with this process in such a way that it still puts the government authority in the lead.
And this is something that we need to encourage in our time and time and again because we, as development organisations do not have the official mandate to lead certain processes, so we can only facilitate and empower the government,” Mr. Mumuni reiterated.
Heads of the Environmental Departments from both Assemblies took participants through the processes and stages before arriving at the final documents.
NALLAP is a WASH sector multi-stakeholder platform with the overall goal of improving sector learning and dialogue.
The platform offers learning and sharing opportunities for sector players as one of the practical approaches to improving sector engagement and sharing with the long-term aim of achieving a knowledge-driven wash sector that delivers quality and sustainable service in Ghana.
NALLAP is hosted by the Ghana WASH Resource Center Network (RCN).
