The massive city upgrading envisaged for Ho under the Ghana Urban Management Pilot Programme (GUMPP) should be matched by responsible individual and corporate sanitation practices. This is the only way the municipality would be able to attain the aesthetic eminence associated with modern municipalities across the world.
Mr Francis Abotsi, Volta Regional Director of the Environmental Health Services Department said these in an interview with the Ghana News Agency on Tuesday.
Under the GUMPP project launched on Monday in Ho by Vice-President John Mahama, the Volta Regional Capital will get an Engineering Landfill Site and an abattoir complex beside a new market complex and re-aligned streets among others.
Mr Abotsi said though the landfill site will replace the current crude disposal system, the attitudes of inhabitants and guests in sanitation matters would reflect on the community’s level of neatness.
Mr Abotsi said the landfill site where garbage would be segregated and appropriately managed and processed would mean very little if people continued to throw garbage around indiscriminately.
He said it was also important that the programme took capacity building seriously, so as not to install plants without the sustainable manpower base to run them.
On the availability of toilets, Mr Abotsi said it was regrettable that a little more than 20 per cent of houses in the newly developing and planned areas of the municipality had no toilets.
He complained about privately operated commercial toilets in inaccessible areas of the municipality, which were manually dislodged and huge volumes of excreta dumped into water ways.
Other sanitation facilities in the GUMPP, which would span five years, according to a project brief made available to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at the Project Launch, include “drainage systems to limit flood risks, stagnant water and associated diseases”.
Vice-President John Dramani Mahama, formally launching the programme urged beneficiary metropolitan areas to strive to meet the standards set under the programme’s performance monitoring regime.
He said the inclusion of Ho, which is a municipal area, meant the process to raise it to a metropolitan status was imminent.
Other beneficiaries of GUMPP are Kumasi, Sekondi-Takoradi and Tamale metropolises.
The GUMPP aims at promoting sustainable development from “a financial, environmental and social perspective”.
Political heads of the beneficiary cities and all districts in the Volta Region, scores of chiefs and NDC party functionaries attended the launch.**
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