Cecilia Abena Dapaah, Minister-designate for Sanitation and Water Resources, has disclosed that some 10 million residents in urban areas benefited from the free water programme that was introduced by the Akufo-Addo government during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Minister-designate made this disclosure yesterday when she appeared before the Appointments Committee of Parliament.
In the President’s quest to help protect Ghanaians from the effects of the virus, the government took the decision to provide relief to Ghanaians, which included the absorption of electricity and water bills.
The Minister-designate informed the Committee that the government spent GHC840 million on the citizenry to make sure there was no outbreak of cholera, dysentery and other diseases during the Covid-19 period.
“For urban water, 10 million people benefited, but I’m yet to get the final figure for rural water,” she said.
Cleanest city
Answering questions on efforts made so far to ensure that Accra becomes the cleanest city, the Minister-designate said despite missing out on the initial target of making Accra the cleanest city in Africa within four years, the Akufo-Addo administration is still on course to fulfilling this promise.
“Accra is on course to becoming the cleanest city that the President said in absolute terms. I think we are on course, looking at what we started doing and what I continued from my colleague,” the nominee said.
It was back in 2017 that President Akufo-Addo declared his government’s intention to make Ghana’s capital city the cleanest on the continent by the end of his first term in office.
Mrs Dapaah noted that “when you start a process, it takes time to yield results.”
She cited some government programmes like the provision of dust bins on streets to prevent littering as being key to this target.
“Most important of all, we have also, through the GAMA (Greater Accra Metropolitan Area) project, provided 33,000 household toilets. That is also part of the cleanliness projects we have undertaken,” Mrs Dapaah added.
In remarks back in August 2020, Mrs Dapaah, who was the Sanitation and Water Resources Minister, said the government had attained the goal to make Accra the cleanest city during the lockdown necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic.
But she said after the restrictions were lifted, the filth started re-emerging.
Mrs Dapaah further noted that the proposed Sanitation Fund would aid efforts to make Ghana as a whole cleaner.
“We are proposing that there should be a Sanitation Fund, either supplied by the Government of Ghana or through a sanitation levy, so that we will be well-equipped financially to take care of the gap in the financing of sanitation in this country,” she said.