He said this would enable them to build more household toilet facilities in order to improve environmental sanitation in the country. “With the new reduction of the 30 per cent payment of the total cost, we believe that residents would take more advantage of building more toilets facilities in the municipality,” he said.Mr Anku said this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency on the side-lines of the project town hall meeting in the Ga East Municipality of the Greater Accra Region.

The GAMA-SWP is a five-year $150 million project funded by the World Bank through the International Development Agency (IDA) grant to provide water and sanitation services to urban communities. The project is currently being implemented in 11 metropolitan and municipal assemblies in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area and aimed at building 19,000 toilets.

It is also expected to build 250 toilets for schools within the Greater Accra Metropolis and also apply some behavioural change communication strategies to work on the attitudes of the people with regards to open defecation.  Mr Anku said the toilets were to address the acute sanitation and water challenges confronting the urban communities, particularly the low income areas, and has so far built more than 600 household toilets.

He said the ban that was put on the GAMA-SWP by the World Bank due to some social and environmental safeguard standards had been lifted and that the project team was expecting contractors back to the project sites by Wednesday, April 12. He said though there were other projects under the GAMA-SWP its main emphasis was on the sanitation aspect.

Mr Anku said Ghana, under the millennium goals, had reached about 80 per cent of water supply but was far below when it came to sanitation.  He said the Ga East Municipality was aiming to build 3000 household toilets facilities of which 38 had so far been built whilst 680 households are registered.   Mr Okunyin Boaz Orlan-Hackman, GAMA-SWP Promotion Team Officer and Public Relations Officer of the Ga East Municipal Assembly, said the task to bring the households on board to register had not been easy.