He said working in isolation to achieve good health, hygiene, and sanitation results had been slow and it was therefore necessary for more innovations to scale up efforts.

The Country Director was addressing Journalists after the launch of a report on how the various sectors could effectively coordinate their activities for maximum impacts on WASH.

Mr Nashru said the report highlighted on the need for all sectors to coordinate to integrate health water and sanitation as well as investments to ensure that whatever actions planned as priorities received the needed funding either through private sector or in partnership with government and other development partners to ensure that the best results was achieved.

Referring to the Upper East Region, Mr Nashiru expressed worry at the challenges mothers go through each day before accessing WASH facilities and indicated that new, and expectant mothers and children could not continue to go through such challenges where new mothers walked right after delivery to long distances in search for water and other related facilities.

He said Water Aid’s vision was to ensure that every one everywhere had access to safe water and indicated that it did that through the provision of water sanitation and hygiene facilities.Mr Chaka Uzondu, Policy Manager of Water Aid, who presented the report said investing in an integrated approach to WASH would help reduce burdens on the health care system in the country and added that policy makers, development partners and institutions needed to be ambitious in their thinking to genuinely bring development to the people.

He noted that the era where funding for WASH was donor related resulted in positive outcomes even though it was slow and therefore called for  multi-sector approach to internally support the drive to coordinate, integrate and invest in WASH and health interventions.He urged Municipal and District assemblies to help in ensuring that Water, Hygiene and Sanitation was made a priority to promote comprehensive behaviour, citing situations where toilet facilities were cited without available water for hand washing.

Ms Fauzia Aliu, Policy Officer at Water Aid-Ghana called on sectors to streamline their activities in WASH by integrating the areas with poor WASH delivery services and jointly targeted activities on child health, nutrition and WASH.

The report launch was attended by community WASH committees, WASH artisans, District and Regional Health Management staff, media personnel, and NGOs in WASH operating areas in the Upper East Region.