Sustainability challenges of the Ghana water sector

Ghana is one of the learning countries of the Triple-S initiative. What the project seeks to do in Ghana, is to work with the sector to define new ways of making water services more reliable and sustainable so that coverage can be increased and everybody can be reached.

What Triple-S has done so far in Ghana is to look at what has already been done in the sector, and assess what has gone well and what could be improved.

In this video, Vida refers to the sector as a ship that is on a voyage. There was something in place that was taking the sector towards full coverage, but the ship was basically moving too slow, indicating that there could be something wrong with the ship. However not meaning that the whole ship needs to be thrown away and a new one needs to be bought. And so the work began with carrying out a sector diagnosis. By looking at the ship, see the parts that are working, and the parts that require improvement.

The diagnosis of the ship helped to clarify the challenges of the Ghana water sector:

• Lack of a common approach: the sector did have documents in place: there was a policy and there were some operational documents. However these were defined specifically for projects. What was lacking was a common approach on how to deliver water services.
• Lack of defined standards and benchmarks for delivering water services: resulting that monitoring activities were not geared towards service delivery monitoring, but only looking at how many infrastructure projects had been put in place. Monitoring of services delivery according to defined standards for water quality, reliability or in terms the geographical distance that it takes to get water was lacking.
• Lack of clarity in terms of roles and responsibilities: the system and structure for water governance has defined clear roles at the policy level, and at the level of the agency that facilitates the delivery of water services, but the role of local governments in the delivery of water services was unclear. 
• Lack of clarity in financing post-construction support: there is clarity around how new investments are financed, but when it comes to post-construction support and financing of major maintenance there wasn’t any clarity.

So those were the things that were found to be wrong with the ship and Triple-S is together with the sector now moving into action to refurbish the ship. The end objective for Triple-S is to reduce service downtime, so that people who have had the privilege of getting water facilities will not have to go back to the river to fetch water and that those who in the past haven’t had the opportunity of getting water facilities would get access, so that they will stop walking long distances in search of water. ‘Our objective is that we will have sustainable water services, services that are reliable, to those who already have, and we can also bring the coverage to scale to those who don’t have.’