Sunyani, April 1, GNA - A programme officer of the Environmental Health and Sanitation Directorate (EHSD) of the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, Mr. Kweku Quansah, has disclosed that Ghana requires about $1.5 billion within the next five years at the peak of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) target, in order to attain the MDG in Sanitation. This means that annually the country will need a capital investment of about $300 million to be able to attain the sanitation MDG target, he said. Mr Quansah, who made this known in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Sunyani on Tuesday, said the political authorities, donors and households were ready to invest this much to push the sanitation coverage up, "because in the whole of West Africa we are last but one and it doesn't auger well because Ghana has done well in so many areas but unfortunately in sanitation we are lagging behind and there is the need to double up ourselves and ensure that we achieve the MDG target."

The programme officer, who was a participant at a two-day Annual Review Workshop of WaterAid, Ghana and its partners, however, hastened to add that it was not likely Ghana might achieve the target, adding that the MDG target was only the basic target required for sanitation coverage and not the ultimate.

Mr Quansah said "after the MDG we still have to work hard to let our people have decent latrines, and that is what we are working towards, so we should not discourage anybody that we might miss the MDGs." "The most important thing is that it is going to ignite the fire for us to move ahead, and after the MDGs attain some of the targets we have set for ourselves and it is important for the sector to do that," declared. Speaking to the coverage of water and sanitation issues in Ghana for the past five years, Mr Quansah stated that in the sanitation sector Ghana had not been doing well at all.

He said improved sanitation, including improved latrines in households, which was around 10 per cent, moved to 11 per cent while the latest figures released by the Joint Monitoring Platform (JMP) of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), in collaboration with the Water and Sanitation Monitoring Platform (WSMP) in Ghana pegged the country's performance at 12.4 per cent. He lamented that Ghana was only moving marginally, and that the pace was very slow with respect to improvement in the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene sector. "We need to really double up and this requires funding," he asserted.

He was very hopeful, however, that Government, development partners and individual Ghanaians will make available the needed funds to push the water and sanitation sector forward because sanitation is life and dignity and can improve school-girl education, adding that it was at the core centre of the eight MDGs.

Mr. Quansah urged the private sector to get involved, participate and support work in the sector, as 80 per cent of the work in the sanitation sector was ceded to them, adding that because sanitation was about behavioural change, once they assisted in attaining that the problems of sanitation would be solved by about 50 per cent.