Community Participation in the National Sanitation Day Exercise: Insights from Accra Metropolis and Mpohor District

Abstract

Solid waste poses serious environmental and health challenges in Ghana because there is a waste collection and disposal deficit by local authorities. In an attempt to offset these risks,government has introduced several policy interventions. Notable amongst them are: the public private- partnership (PPP), the pay-as-you-dump (PAYD) policy and the development of a national policy to guide local authorities to maintain effective environmental sanitation. Despite these interventions, the risks associated with waste still persist. A cholera outbreak recently caused many human causalities and it prompted government to institutionalise a national cleanup exercise to be celebrated on the first Saturday of every month. Community participation in the exercise was satisfactory at the beginning, but with time, participation started waning and the exercise failed at the long run. It became imperative to examine the factors accounting for the failure of the national sanitation day (NSD) exercise. This study uses the Icek Adjzen Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) as its theoretical framework. Drawing insights from Accra Metropolis and the Mpohor District, the study adopts the comparative research design to undertake this research. Adopting a mixed method strategy, a 200 household survey and 9 key-informant interviews were conducted. Results from the study showed that the absence of a legal instrument to back the NSD exercise, the absence of remedial action to sanction defaulters, the attitude of community members, the failure of service providers to collect waste after the exercise and the inadequate provision of incentives accounted for the low community turn-out in the NSD exercise. Another reason why the policy intervention failed was that it lacked local ownership. The study demonstrates the importance of adopting bottom-up approaches in community-based initiatives. The study concludes that any policy born out of an empirical vacuum is bound to fail.