A three-million dollar initiative, Result Based Financing for Sustainable Sanitation and Hygiene project seeking to improve WASH coverage in four districts of the Northern Region, has been launched in Banvim in Tamale.

A total of 112,500 from 75 communities in the West and East Gonja, Tamale Metro and Saboba as well as 4000 school children are to benefit from the three-year project, which is being financed by the government of Japan through its Social Development Fund.

The project, which aims to improve the current regional WASH coverage of about nine percent, has components that includes community led total sanitation, school led total sanitation and village savings and the set up loans enterprises.

Speaking at Banvim, a community in the Tamale South Sub-metro,  Mr Akwasi Oppong-Fosu, the Minister of  Local government and Rural Development, said the implementation of the initiative would adopt a bottom-up approach and focus on behavioral change communication.

He said statistics showed that poor sanitation accounted for about 70 percent out-patient attendance in health institutions and accounted for 25 per cent death of children under five.

Mr Oppong-Fosu expressed government’s commitment and support to ensuring the successful implementation of the project through effective Monitoring and Evaluation as well as knowledge dissemination.

Mr Bede Ziedeng, the Northern Regional Minister, said sanitation remained one of the nation’s greatest challenges and expressed fears that targets on the Millennium Development Goals on sanitation could not be achieved if stringent measures were not put in place.

“Indeed it is  unfortunate that Ghana lies at the second to bottom only before Mali in open defecation in West Africa and that it is feared that over 18 million Ghanaians will not have access to improved sanitation by 2015,” he said.

Read more at Ghana Business News.