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 The Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA) have provided water for 23,939 rural communities and small towns throughout the country.
The water is in the form of boreholes, hand-dug wells and small community piped schemes.
The Central Region has the highest coverage, with 3,224 communities benefiting, with the Greater Accra Region being the least covered, with 851 communities, with a population of 424,667, benefiting.
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the CWSA, Mr. Clement Bugase, announced this when he updated the Minister of Water Resources, Works and Housing, Mr. E.T. Mensah, on the achievement of the agency so far during a familiarisation visit by the Minister to the CWSA in Accra last Friday.
The visit was the minister’s first to an agency under his ministry since he moved from the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare to the current ministry. It also took him the Department of Rural Hosing.
At both places, Mr. Mensah met the management and staff to learn at first-hand their challenges and formally introduced himself as the new sector Minster.
The CWSA was established in 1998 by an act of Parliament as the statutory body mandated to manage the National Community Water and Sanitation Programme (NCWSA).
Its primary objective is to facilitate the provision of safe water and related sanitation services for rural communities and small towns across the country.
Mr. Bugase said there was an upward trend in rural water coverage, accounting for an improved sanitation delivery system in the rural communities.
The CWSA, he explained, had put together 168 district water and sanitation teams to ensure strict compliance with good hygienic practices, adding that the number of water committees established in the 168 operational districts stood at 2,217.
Touching on some challenges the agency faced, he gave a litany of issues, including district level implementation bottlenecks, inadequate funding, the monitoring of operations, maintenance of existing systems and the non-payment of institutional tariffs.
On the way forward, the CEO under-scored the need for the promotion of community-led sanitation systems to help address the problem of poor sanitation coverage.
Mr. Mensah, for his part, called for cooperation between the management and staff of the agency to enable it to effectively deliver on its mandate.
He tasked the members of staff to be part of the solution of the challenges confronting the agency.
At the Department of Rural Housing, its Director, Ms. Deborah Kuwornu, complained of continued encroachment on its land, despite efforts to stop the development.
Mr. Mensah assured her that a task force would be setup to ward off the encroachers.
Source: Daily Graphic
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