According to him, the slow progress Ghana is making at attaining Open Defecation Free (ODF) status has put the country behind the likes of Benin, Ethiopia, Mali and Burkina Faso.
The World Bank Water and Sanitation program says Open Defecation alone costs Ghana 79 million US Dollars a year.
“As we move to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we are confronted with how much further we have to travel. In 15 years, between now and 2030; we need to support over five million Ghanaians to stop defecating in the open. Yet our current rate of progress suggests that this will take 500 years,” Duncan stated at the launch of a media campaign to eradicate open Defecation in the country.
Between June, last year, and December 2015, 25,000 Ghanaians were infected with cholera.
The media campaign seeks to highlight the economic, health and social challenges associated with open defecation, while stressing the ultimate benefits of eliminating the practice.
The UNICEF official lamented that four out of every five persons living in northern Ghana, in particular, defecated in the open because they had no toilets.
Duncan said there was no magic formula for stopping the practice as work all over the world had shown that stopping open Defecation “is first and foremost about changing of behaviors, changing of attitudes and changing what is normal”.
Out of the 54 percent target for improved Sanitation, Ghana was able to achieve only 15 percent on the just ended Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
In his statement, Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Collins Dauda, estimated that Ghana would require total expenditure of 1.5 billion U.S. Dollars or 70 dollars per capita over the next 10 years to meet the sanitation targets.
“The impact of poor sanitation affects the poor most. The poorest in Ghana is 22 times more likely to practice open defecation than the richest. Similar disparity can be cited between the urban and rural dwellers,” he stated.
Official data suggest that approximately 19,000 Ghanaians, including 5,100 children under the age of five die each year from diarrhea in Ghana, with nearly 90 percent of the deaths directly attributable to poor water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH).
”All indicators point to the fact that we need to put efforts into reducing open defecation and eventually eliminate this practice,” the statement said. Enditem.
Source: Xinhua
