Paper short abstract:

How can Ghana's local governance system be responsive to sanitation issues?How can stronger institutions and effective leadership be built to ensure proper attention to sanitation service delivery?What lesson can be learnt from the role of traditional leaders towards ensuring healty andclean cities?

Paper long abstract:

In the past, predominantly rural communities and small towns were kept clean through regular communal labour and rules concerning ownership of latrines and safe disposal of waste. Further, sanitary inspectors took to the going of households to ensure general cleanliness and took necessary legal action against offenders of local bye-laws. These strong institutions and leadership ensured clean and healthy societies. Rapid urbanisation coupled with high population growth has led to complex sanitation challenges especially in urban areas. These have further compounded due to the ineffective institutional set-up and weak leadership for sanitation service delivery. Environmental Health Officers who are supposed to be in the forefront for ensuring sanitation service delivery lack the requisite educational training to understand the complexities of sanitation service delivery. Majority of the few Public Health Engineers who were posted to the various District Assemblies have also vacated their posts due to frustrations in the local government system. These institutional lapses have resulted in blatant disregard for local sanitation bye-laws leading to high open defecation rates, indiscriminate littering and dumping of refuse. 2017 saw the birth of a Ministry for Sanitation and Water Resources by the President who further declared his intentions to make Accra the cleanest city in Africa by 2020. Two years down the line, little has been done to ensure that this laudable pronouncement becomes a reality. Ghana's woeful sanitation coverage (20% of the population has access to basic sanitation facilities) makes one wonder if the country will achieve the SDG 6 by 2030.