Ghana to achieve water supply target
Ghana has been cited among the few countries in sub-Sahara Africa which are on course to achieving the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for water supply by 2015, the Brong Ahafo Regional Director of the Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA), Mr Emmanuel Foster Boateng, has said.
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He noted that as Ghana continued to work towards meeting this MDG target for water supply, and subsequently attaining universal coverage for water by 2025, there was the need to put in place measures to ensure that investments made in the water sector were sustainable.
Mr Boateng said this at the first Regional Learning Alliance meeting organised by the Brong Ahafo Regional Directorate of the CWSA and the Sustainable Services at Scale (Triple-S) project in Sunyani.
The meeting brought together stakeholders in the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector in the region to share their experiences of the best practices and find solution to the challenges facing the water sector in the region.
It was also to discuss the establishment of the learning alliance platform to improve and promote experience sharing and learning.
Mr Boateng, in his opening remarks, said for the rural water sector to achieve the MDG targets and to meet the universal coverage by 2025, there was the need to take steps to address the challenges of fragmentation of approaches to water service delivery, weak co-ordination, gap between policy and practice, barriers to the update of innovation practices among actors in the sector.
The Brong Ahafo Regional Director of the CWSA, therefore, called for cooperation among stakeholders towards good management of water, which was underscored by the United Nations General Assembly when it declared 2013 as the "International Year of Water Co-operation".
"The CWSA Brong Ahafo Region is therefore enthused about this opportunity of forming a learning alliance platform in the region. We are hopeful that this platform will bring together civil society, representatives from the government and private sector to share ideas and innovations which will lead to sustainable water service delivery in the country", he said.
Mr Abu Wumbei, Water Resources Centre Network (RCN), Ghana, said the network was to promote knowledge management within the WASH sector.
He said an environmental scan carried out by the Triple-S project under the auspices of the CWSA, noted weak systems and structures for capturing and sharing of experiences and best practices within the WASH sector.
Again, much of the information on the sector had not been captured or shared, and the little available is held at individual organisational level, making accessibility to the public difficult.
It was against this backdrop that the learning alliance platform had to be established to allow horizontal communication between different institutions operating at the same institutional level and vertical communication between field experience and the highest levels of policy making.
The learning alliance will also stimulate and facilitate structured dissemination of lessons and results beyond the membership of the alliance itself, and would thus play a role in improving co-ordination.
By Samuel Duodu/Ghana