Sanitation delivery goes hi-tech
Waste collection and disposal in Ghana has been a hydra for the country over the years.
Advertisement
Heaps of rubbish at designated collection points and in waste bins in front of residencies remain uncollected for days, weeks, months and sometimes years.
That situation, coupled with bad sanitation and hygiene practices by the average Ghanaian, has culminated in very insanitary conditions all across the country, especially in large metropolitan areas
.
The insanitary conditions have not only given Ghana the unenviable title of one of the dirtiest countries in the world, but they have also increased the disease and health burdens of the country, with cholera being at the forefront of diseases that have claimed a lot of lives lately.
All that may become a thing of the past if the newly introduced Urban Sanitation Module in the National Service Scheme (NSS) chalks up success.
IT application
The module will employ information technology in the collation, storage and use of data to capture information on structures and households composition, as well as the Global Positioning System (GPS) of all structures, to enable effective planning in all sectors of the economy.
Primarily, though, the 2,000 national service persons who have been deployed to all the 10 regions of the country and attached to the various metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) would electronically take details from both serviced and non-serviced households and properties.
According to Mr Emmanuel Bekoe, the Operations Manager of the National Wsate Distribution, the service persons would be required to visit and take details of properties and the households in those properties, while verification and validation of the data would be done at the office before they are loaded into the terminal system.
The urban sanitation module
Giving more details on the sanitation module at its launch in Accra last Thursday, Mr Bekoe said “at any point in time the service persons register or take details of a property, they also take the GPS coordinates of that property. So back at the office we know exactly the location of that property on the map and, therefore, we will be able to identify difficulties.”
He explained that after the validation and verification, there would be a pool database.
Mr Bekoe said NaWaBin was collaborating with the Town and Country Planning Department (TCPD) for maps and also with the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) for data on the country’s households as well as the GSS’s projections for the households.
These collaborations would provide the needed a baseline data for the national service persons to work with, he said.
After getting all the required data from households and properties, the programme will assess the number of households in the country that do not have access to waste management services to aid in the provision of such services.
Mr Bekoe also said to put an end to the difficulty in identifying the waste bins supplied, all the waste bins would henceforth be given Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, which is a tracking system that uses intelligent bar codes to track items.
“What it means is that anytime a bin is serviced with a truck which has a RFID scanner, it is able to read that tag on it and the tag contains the details of the client or the customer and, therefore, we are able to know at the back office which client has been serviced on which day, and at which time,” he explained.
He added that the new system would solve the issue of providing proof of service, as the scanners on the trucks would always send the information on service to the office. Furthermore, all waste trucks have been tracked to know their exact location at anytime of the day, which Mr Bekoe believes will eventually lead to the reduction of maintenance and operational costs, while a fuel monitoring system has been fixed on all the trucks to monitor sharp drops in fuel.
An automated revenue generation system, he said, would also plug all leakages and enhance revenue generation.
The NaWaBin programme and the service person
The (NaWaBin) programme hopes to distribute not less than two million free waste bins across the country.
The sanitation module was birthed through discussions between the NaWaBin and the NSS in September 2014 to help with waste collection before the waste got into the drains, and was preceded by a pilot with 100 service persons who went from house to house in some municipalities in Accra to collect data.
Co-opting the service persons, however, has not been without some misgivings because of the negative tag that has been given to any sanitation-related work.
Ms Lilian Assan, a science graduate from the University of Ghana, Legon, is a service person who has been posted to Sowutuom in the Ga Central municipality. She told the Daily Graphic that “when I was told I had been posted to this project, I had no idea what it was about. When I got to know, I didn’t like it very much but I was advised to go and find out whether it is in connection with the course I read and I realised it has a little connection because in science we have the environmental aspect.”
In a separate interview, Mr Ocloo Wills, a psychology graduate from the University of Cape Coast (UCC) said, “when I saw my posting to NaWaBin I asked what they do and I was told that maybe I will be going round to collect waste bin bills or bills for garbage but I searched on the Internet and saw that the institution manages waste in the country and was launched last year.” Mr Wills has been posted to the Ledzokuku Krowor Municipal Assembly (LEKMA).