‘Ban use of waste water for vegetable farming’
Residents of the Tamale Metropolis have called for legislation to ban the use of waste water for vegetable farming in the metropolis.
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Beyond the use of waste water, the residents said some vegetable farms were also sited close to public places of convenience.
These were contained in the report of a survey conducted in January 2015 to assess the opinions of the residents on issues affecting their health, livelihood and food security.
Two hundred and eight persons who were randomly selected took part in the two-day survey aimed at providing direction for the local government, as well as donor agencies, on how to address the most pressing needs of the people in the metropolis.
Deliberative Polling
The survey dubbed "Deliberative Polling" (DP) is an innovative citizens’ consultative process that assesses the representative opinions of a population, both before and after it has had a good chance to thoroughly discuss problems confronting their communities, and identifying appropriate solutions to them.
The DP was conducted by the West Africa Resilience Innovation Labs (RLabs) and hosted by the University for Development Studies in collaboration with the Centre for Deliberative Democracy (CDD) at the Stanford University, USA.
It forms part of the Resilient Africa Network (RAN) programme being funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that brings together a network of 20 African universities in 16 countries united in pursuit of the vision of building resilient African communities through innovative solutions.
The Tamale DP, which is the first to be conducted in West Africa, showed that a representative sample of the population became more informed after the deliberations, and they identified specific policy solutions that could help address Tamale’s urgent problems.
Results of the DP
The results of the survey showed that a higher percentage of the people wanted clean water to be used for the production of vegetables, while others strongly recommended a ban on using untreated waste water for crop cultivation. Some also wanted the use of drift irrigation.
The respondents also proposed the promotion of low-cost treatment of waste water for farming through the use of charcoal and stones, and the use of environmentally friendly toilets in all houses.
The results also indicated that some respondents suggested the setting up of rainwater-harvesting systems in education institutions, promotion of more consumption of local foods and encouraging public-private partnerships to convert human waste to energy.
The Director of Stanford University’s Centre for Deliberative Democracy, Professor Jim Fishkin, who presented the results in Tamale, commended Ghana for the successful DP and urged stakeholders not to relent in their efforts to help raise the voices of communities in their development aspirations and stressed the need for district assemblies to be fully involved in addressing the concerns raised in the report.