It’s a shame that at this point in time we still have to deal with diseases emanating from filth, but evidently we do and very little is ever done about it.
Aside the poor planning of the city one of the biggest reasons for the perennial flooding is improper disposal of waste, always leaving our drains choked.
Filth is almost synonymous with our glorious capital, and apparently it is for most of the country as well. Coalition of NGOs in Water and Sanitation (CONIWAS) carried out a study nationwide, to determine the % of people who defecate in the open (or free range as we call it), and the results are alarming although not entirely surprising.
Nationwide, Upper East Region took the cake with a whopping 82% of its residents practicing ‘free range’.
The Executive Director of CONIWAS, Benjamin Arthur, presented the findings at a book launch in Accra on Thursday.
8% of the residents of Accra were found to often engage in the alarming practice. Extrapolating that into numbers using the 4m Accra residents found by the 2010 census, that’s about 320,000 people in the capital openly decorating the city.
Benjamin Arthur also noted that unless people attached more seriousness to to sanitation, cases of cholera and other diseases would continue to increase.
See the nationwide spread of ‘free rangers’ below…
Upper East Region- 82%
Upper West Region- 79%
Northern Region- 73%
Volta Region- 31%
Central Region- 18%
Western Region- 13%
Greater Accra Region- 8%
Eastern Region- 6%
Brong Ahafo Region- 6%
Ashanti Region- 3%