Money for Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for water- Ghana and MOZAMBIC

Here are excepts from two story about reaching  Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)  for water.  I dont think we should compare, but rather understand the vastness of the issues

MOZAMBICAN GOVT LAUNCHES NATIONAL RURAL WATER, SANITATION PROGRAMME

NAM NEWS NETWORK Mar 31st, 2010  http://brunei.fm/

MAPUTO, March 31 (NNN-AIM) — The Mozambican government has launched its National Rural Water and Sanitation Programme (PRONASUR), intended to ensure that Mozambique can comply with the water-related targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

This MDG target is to reduce by half, between 1990 and 2015, the percentage of the population without permanent access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation.

PRONASUR will run from 2010 to 2015 and is budgeted at 300 million USD. It aims to increase the percentage of the rural population with access to clean water from the current 54 per cent to 70 per cent. Over the same period it hopes to lift basic sanitation coverage from 39 to 50 per cent.

In order to reach these goals, the programme intends to build 12,000 new water sources, and 120 small water supply systems. This will benefit an additional 4.5 million people, bringing to 13 million the number of people with access to clean water. The programme will also rehabilitate those rural water systems that are currently out of order.

As for sanitation, PRONASUR envisages the construction of more than 400,000 improved latrines, which at an average of five people per household will benefit a further two million people.

Through a strategy entitled “Community Headed Total Sanitation”, the new programme hopes to reduce, as quickly as possible, the practice, extremely common in parts of the country, of defecating in the open, regarded as one of the key ways in which diarrhoeal diseases, including cholera are spread.

The donors to the Water Sector Common Fund (Britain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada and UNICEF) have pledged 9.5 million USD to PRONASUR for 2010, and the Mozambican government is contributing a further 2.0 million USD. — NNN-AIM

source http://news.brunei.fm/2010/03/31/mozambican-govt-launches-national-rural-water-sanitation-programme

Ghana needs $1.5b to meet MDG sanitation target

source   http://www.ghanabusinessnews.com

A programme officer of the Environmental Health and Sanitation Directorate (EHSD) of the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, Mr. Kweku Quansah, has disclosed that Ghana requires about $1.5 billion within the next five years at the peak of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) target, in order to attain the MDG in Sanitation.

He said this means that annually the country will need a capital investment of about $300 million to be able to attain the sanitation MDG target.

Mr. Quansah, who disclosed this in an interview with this reporter in Sunyani Tuesday, said the political authorities, donors and households are ready to invest this much to push the sanitation coverage up, “because in the whole of West Africa we are last but one and it doesn’t auger well because Ghana has done well in so many areas but unfortunately in sanitation we are lagging behind and there is the need to double up ourselves and ensure that we achieve the MDG target.”

He however hastened to add that it is not likely Ghana might achieve the target, adding that the MDG target is only the basic target required for sanitation coverage and not the ultimate.

Mr. Kweku Quansah said “after the MDG we still have to work hard to let our people have decent latrines, and that is what we are working towards, so we should not discourage anybody that we might miss the MDGs.”

According to him, “the most important thing is that it is going to ignite the fire for us to move ahead, and after MDGs attain some of the targets we have set for ourselves and it is important for the sector to do that.”

Speaking to the coverage of water and sanitation issues in Ghana for the past five years, Mr. Kweku Quansah told this reporter that in the sanitation sector Ghana has not been doing well at all.

He said improved sanitation (improved latrines) in households was around 10%, moved to 11%, while the latest figures released by the Joint Monitoring Platform (JMP) of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in collaboration with the Water and Sanitation Monitoring Platform (WSMP) in Ghana pegged the country’s performance at 12.4%.

The programme officer, who was a participant at a two-day Annual Review Workshop of WaterAid, Ghana and its partners, lamented that Ghana is only moving marginally, and that the pace is very slow with respect to improvement in the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene sector. “We need to really double up and this requires funding,” he asserted.

He was very hopeful however, that Government, development partners and individual Ghanaians will make available the needed funds to push the water and sanitation sector forward because sanitation is life, dignity and can improve school-girl education , saying it is at the core centre of the eight MDGs.

Mr. Quansah urged the private sector to be involved, participate and support work in the sector, as 80% of the work in the sanitation sector is ceded to them, adding that because sanitation is about behavioural change, once they assist in attaining that the problems of sanitation would be 50% solved.

By Edmund Smith-Asante