Some selected basic schools in the Sagnarigu District in the Northern Region have been provided with water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) items to promote hand washing and basic hygiene practices among children in the beneficiary schools.
The items, which included water storage containers, basins, towels and soaps, were provided by the Wuni Zaligu Development Association (WUZDA) with funding from the Ghana Wash Alliance, both WASH non-governmental organisations (NGO), at a cost of GH¢8,000.
Improving sanitation in schools
At the hand over ceremony, the Country Coordinator of the Ghana Wash Alliance, Mr Eric Chimsi, said WUZDA was one of the many organisations their institution was partnering as a way of strengthening sanitation in communities and schools.
He said it was a collective responsibility to ensure that our surroundings were clean as it was going to go a long way to improve upon our health conditions.
Mr Chimsi said the Ghana Wash Alliance, through a research partnership with the University for Development Studies (UDS), was constructing child-friendly toilets for pupils in various schools in the region.
Importance of the National Sanitation Day
The District Chief Executive (DCE) for Sagnarigu, Mr Alhassan Mohammed Sorugodow, who officially handed over the items to some teachers of the beneficiary schools, urged the teachers to educate the pupils on the need to wash their hands with soap whenever they visited places of convenience.
He said the declaration of the first Saturday of every month as National Sanitation Day was part of the government’s initiative to address the poor sanitation situation in the country.
The DCE also advised the pupils not to only practise personal hygiene at school, but also at home since it was a positive way of preventing diseases.
Later in an interview, the programme manager for WUZDA, Mr Abdul Karim Ziblim, said his organisation chose sanitation because of the outbreak of cholera in the country last year, which led to the loss of lives, was due to the poor mismanagement of refuse in the country.
He advised the youth to make the fight for good sanitation a priority for all and desist from indiscriminate dumping of refuse and littering the environment.
He thanked the Dutch Government and Ghana Wash Alliance for their immense contributions and called for support for the district to fight sanitation since WUZDA could not attain that goal alone.
