Ing. Dr. Worlonyo Kwadjo Siabi, Chief Executive Officer of the Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA)
The Chief Executive Officer of the Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA), Ing. Dr. Worlonyo Kwadjo Siabi, has disclosed that 61.61 per cent of rural communities and small towns in the country had access to potable water as at 2021.
This, he indicated, covers water services provided by non-governmental organisations, religious bodies and state institutions such as CWSA and Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies.
Taking his turn at the Ministry of Information’s bi-weekly press briefing held in Accra yesterday, Dr. Kwadjo Siabi noted that Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) activities provided by CWSA have so far covered 17,441 communities across the country.
“With this one, because government’s role is to ensure that we provide water to everybody in Ghana, so we capture only the infrastructure that is provided by the state. And once the resources from the NGOs and religious bodies are donated, and they provide water facilities, CWSA captures all of these data. Those provided by the private sector and self-supplies are not included in this data,” he disclosed.
Programmes
He explained that on WASH programmes, CWSA is involved in the facilitation and provision of water related sanitation to households and institutions in rural communities and small towns only, emphasising that his outfit is not responsible for determining other sanitation and hygienic coverage in the country.
This, he explained, is in tandem with the agency’s mandate provided by the Community Water and Sanitation Agency Act, 1998 (ACT 564).
Dr Kwadjo Siabi added that sanitation programmes implemented by CWSA include 21,776 household toilets (9gini-loo type), 568 institutional toilets in 224 basic schools, 974 open defecation free communities, and other hygiene promotion programmes in beneficiary communities.
He added that CWSA is currently managing 177 pipe water systems in 150 districts in the 16 regions of the country, implementing 125 water systems across the country, and has recruited 1,252 additional staff.
Dr. Kwadjo Siabi also noted that his outfit had installed automated pumps and packaged water treatment plants, installed solar energy to reduce operational costs, and deployed software internally to manage its operations.
“As of 2022, water infrastructure available to rural communities and small towns, which have been provided by state institutions (CWSA and MMDAs), NGOs and religious bodies are 29, 785 boreholes fitted with pumps, 546 small towns pipe water systems and 1,215 limited mechanised water,” he pointed out.
SmartTap
Meanwhile, the agency has deployed a SmartTap technology to improve water operation system across the country. This, according to Dr. Kwadjo Siabi, is part of a reformation programme to transform rural communities and the small towns’ WASH sub-sector.
He noted that the technology will help improve the delivery of safe water to rural communities and small towns and promote water related sanitation and hygiene practices across the country.
The CWSA CEO said the technology has been deployed in 11 regions and is improving water system operation and reducing congestion in access to potable drinking water in such areas.
The regions are Central, Western, Western North, Bono East, Bono, Ahafo, Upper West, Upper East, Northern, North East, and Savannah.
“We have noticed that because of the numerous challenges we have and the way the world is going, we can no longer be using the manual way of water production and so we have decided to improve water supply, particularly in our rural areas. And that is why we have deployed what we call the SmartTap.
“With this system, we don’t need water vendors to go and sit there to wait and quarrel and when it is not coming there are insults. The system is token-based which is free and depends on how much water you need, which helps the communities to manage and plan on how much water they need,” he indicated.
He said the provision of potable drinking water to rural areas had improved remarkably since the implementation of the agency’s reform programme.
He added that CWSA is expecting a conversion into a public limited liability company by the end of 2023 to provide more opportunities of serving more communities.
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