Community Participation in the National Sanitation Day Exercise: Insights from Accra Metropolis and Mpohor District
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Date
2017-07
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Publisher
University of Ghana
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.
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Keywords
National Sanitation, Community Participation, Insights from Accra Metropolis and Mpohor District, publicprivate- partnership (PPP)