LET'S CLEAN OUR ENVIRONMENT

YESTERDAY, the Local Government Minister, Mr Kwadwo Adjei-Darko, launched the International Year of Sanitation in Accra with the startling revelation that data available at health facilities in the country indicated that more than 60 per cent of all morbidity and mortality cases were water and sanitation-related.
The theme for the launch was, “Building Partnerships for Improved Sanitation”. Rightly so, the United Nations (UN) had set aside this year as the year for sanitation to highlight the problems of sanitation and how, through partnerships among civil society, governments and individuals, solutions to the problems of sanitation could be found.
Needless to say, the theme is very important for us all, for it brings to the fore issues of sanitation and the need for attitudinal change towards our environment.
For, as a people, our attitude to survival, which translates into a determination to survive and make it in life, regardless of the cost to our communities and the larger society, has, in a large measure, accounted for the sanitation mess we find ourselves in today.
In our part of the world, survival, more than anything else, drives rural/urban migration and what compounds the problem is that most of those who migrate are the youth who have no employable skills.
As a result, most of them take to petty trading on the streets, at the lorry parks and other open places such as around the Kwame Nkrumah Circle, while others engage in menial jobs, some very dehumanising.
The greater number of these people cannot afford decent accommodation, and urged on by the survival instinct, they sleep, cook, bathe and do practically everything at the places where they ply their trades and at other obscure places.
Over time, their indiscriminate littering and disposal of other waste result in rubbish pile ups and their insanitary conditions.
Indeed it has been proved that poor sanitation and water supplies are the engines that drive cycles of disease and poverty in developing countries like ours.
There is the need, therefore, for the nation to invest massively in sanitation and improve its water supplies.
It is clear that investing in sanitation generates massive returns on health, the environment and the economy.
In fact, as the UN states, the evidence is that there is no single development policy intervention that brings greater public health returns than investment in basic sanitation and hygienic practices.
It is in line with this that the DAILY GRAPHIC would like to call for a collaboration among government agencies, metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies, NGOs, private companies and the universities to work out solutions to clean our environment which is being engulfed in filth.
There should also be a national programme that will help raise awareness of our people to stop creating filth in our communities, thereby reducing the incidents of malaria and sanitation-related diseases.