Public Response to the National Sanitation Day Campaign: A Survey of Madina Residents

Abstract

The National Sanitation Day (NSD) Campaign was launched by the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development (MLGRD) to resolve poor sanitation issues in Ghana. The campaign included a communication objective to encourage behaviour change towards good sanitation practice. The study was designed to gauge public attitude and response to the NSD campaign by surveying residents of Madina, a demographically heterogeneous community in Accra. The Multistage cluster sampling procedure was used to select 200 respondents for the study. The research design and questionnaire constructs were driven by the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) in the study. The key findings were that all respondents were aware and had some knowledge of the Campaign. Also, their major sources of receiving information on the campaign included television, radio and information vans. On the contrary, newspapers, family and friends were the least sources of getting information on the campaign. The campaign was found to have caused a behaviour change among majority of the residents towards proper sanitation practice. Other findings were that respondents’ demographics such as age and level of education did not have much influence on their preferred means of getting information and the medium through which they first heard of the campaign. Based on these findings, it is recommended that the MLGRD intensifies the campaign by employing other communication activities and also enforcing laws for all citizens’ participation in the sanitation exercise.