Madam Dapaah (right) welcoming Ms. Heather Cameron(left) to her office.
Mrs Cecilia Dapaah, Minister of Sanitation and Water Resources has called for Canada’s assistance to clean the country’s polluted water bodies caused by illegal mining (galamsey).
She said the turbidity level of the water bodies which have been inundated with heavy chemicals from galamsey operations, still posed a great challenge to water resources management in the country.
Mrs Cecilia Dapaah made the call when Mrs Heather Cameron, Canadian High Commission to Ghana, paid a courtesy call on the Minister at her office on Wednesday.
The working visit, according to the Canadian envoy, was to congratulate the minister on her new appointment, and also find a common platform to consolidate the relationship between the two countries.
Mrs Dapaah said her new portfolio was expansive and quite challenging since water and sanitation played vital role in sustenance and wellbeing of people, adding that it was based on that wisdom that the President merged the two areas into a ministry.
She said that the government had made many in-roads into ensuring portable and quality water at both the rural and the urban areas, adding that in recent times water in some rural areas had been upgraded with filtration mechanism which delivered 99.9 per cent purified water for their consumption.
Mrs Dapaah said in order to deal with open defecation across the country, the ministry had intervened with pragmatic measures by ensuring the provision of community toilet facilities, while in the urban areas, especially in Accra, 13,000 household toilet facilities were provided.
She said though the call to ensure that Accra became the cleanest city in the near future, interventions such as engineering the landfill sites, building storm drains and drainages while managing the collection of waste and its transfer could go a long way to mitigate the sanitation challenges in the city.
Mrs Dapaah said the ministry would soon host a Water Summit in Accra to help bring experts, technocrats, policy makers and other stakeholders together to debate and help find solutions to challenging water and sanitation issues in the country.
Mrs Cameron said Canada had rolled out many intervention policies and projects in the three northern regions for the past 10 years to help support government in its water delivery programmes.
She said Canada would continue to support Ghana as a social partner to enhance the water and sanitation situation in the country.
By Lawrence Markwei
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