Sanitation as National Infrastructure

Roads move people. Electricity powers industry. Water sustains life. Sanitation protects every one of them. A clean country is not created by occasional clean-up exercises. It is built through infrastructure, institutions, responsible citizenship, reliable public services and consistent enforcement sustained across generations. Sanitation is therefore not a favour government performs for citizens. Sanitation is national infrastructure. It protects health. It protects food. It protects water. It protects our environment. It protects tourism and commerce. It protects the dignity of women, children and families. And, properly developed, it creates businesses, industries and thousands of productive jobs. Ghana must therefore move sanitation from the margins of municipal administration to the centre of national development.

Recent videos circulating on Ghanaian social media have shown disturbing conditions along portions of our coastline: refuse accumulating near beaches and fish-landing areas, food being handled close to polluted environments, and citizens resorting to open spaces because adequate sanitation facilities are unavailable or inaccessible. The images are painful. But our response must go beyond anger. We must ask the more important question: What system allowed these conditions to develop and persist? A person living in rented accommodation without adequate toilet facilities still has the same unavoidable human needs as everybody else. A fish processor working beside accumulated refuse did not design the waste-management system. A child growing up beside a polluted drain did not create the drain. We must therefore resist the temptation to turn poverty and inadequate infrastructure into accusations against the character of our people. Where citizens have reasonable alternatives, they must behave responsibly. But where reasonable alternatives do not exist, government has a responsibility to help create them. This is the balance my sanitation policy will maintain: public responsibility, private responsibility and personal responsibility working together.

The problem extends far beyond the particular beaches appearing in today's videos. According to Ghana's 2021 Population and Housing Census, 59.3 percent of households had access to a household toilet facility, with substantial differences between urban and rural communities. About 18 percent of households had no access to a toilet facility. Open defecation was recorded across all sixteen regions, and in five regions more than half of households were affected. These figures describe millions of individual human experiences. They tell us something fundamental: Ghana's sanitation challenge cannot be solved principally through punishment. It must be solved through infrastructure, housing standards, municipal capacity, education, enterprise and responsible enforcement.

Poor sanitation is expensive. It increases disease and healthcare expenditure. It reduces productivity when workers or their children become sick. It damages fisheries and tourism. It contaminates land and water. It consumes working hours. It lowers the attractiveness of communities to businesses and investors. An earlier World Bank study estimated substantial economic losses to Ghana from inadequate sanitation. The exact monetary value will change as Ghana's economy grows. The underlying principle does not: A country pays for sanitation whether it builds it or neglects it. When we build good sanitation systems, we pay through productive investment. When we neglect them, we pay through disease, environmental damage, lost productivity, emergency interventions and diminished human dignity. I choose investment.

One reason sanitation interventions repeatedly disappoint is that we often address individual symptoms rather than the entire system. Sanitation is a chain. It begins with the home and continues through: toilets → collection → drainage → transportation → transfer → treatment → recycling or safe disposal → environmental restoration. Solid waste follows a similar chain: generation → separation → collection → transportation → processing → recovery → recycling → final disposal. If one critical link breaks, waste escapes back into communities, drains, wetlands, rivers and eventually the sea. My administration will therefore adopt a whole-system sanitation approach. Government will no longer celebrate the purchase of refuse trucks, construction of toilets or clearing of drains as isolated achievements while ignoring what happens before and after them. We will measure whether the entire chain works.

Every Ghanaian should ultimately have reasonable access to a safe and dignified toilet. A phased Universal Household Sanitation Standard will therefore establish minimum sanitation requirements for residential and rental properties. New residential construction will be required to comply with appropriate sanitation standards before occupation. Existing properties will be given realistic transition periods. Landlords of modest means should not simply receive an order they cannot afford to implement. Appropriate financing arrangements, technical assistance and approved low-cost sanitation designs should help bring older properties into compliance. And tenants should not carry penalties arising from a landlord's failure to meet legal property requirements. Our objective is compliance, not punishment. The purpose of regulation must be to solve the problem.

Household sanitation cannot be transformed overnight. Government must therefore close immediate gaps. A National Public Sanitation and Waste Infrastructure Programme will prioritise densely populated communities, markets, transport centres, fishing communities, coastal settlements and other areas where sanitation infrastructure has fallen behind population growth. Facilities must not merely be constructed. They must be maintained. A broken public toilet is not sanitation infrastructure. An overflowing refuse container is not waste management. A refuse truck that cannot operate is not municipal capacity. Government must therefore budget for the full life cycle of public infrastructure: construction, operation, maintenance, renewal and eventual replacement.

Our coastline is simultaneously an environmental asset, a source of food, a source of employment and part of Ghana's national inheritance. Fish landing, smoking, drying and processing areas therefore require enforceable hygiene standards appropriate to their circumstances. Government will work with fishing communities, traditional authorities, fish processors, traders, local assemblies and public-health professionals to establish practical standards governing sanitation facilities, refuse management, wastewater and food-handling environments. The people whose livelihoods depend on these facilities should be partners in designing and protecting them. A nation that asks its people to eat from its coastline has a duty to keep that coastline fit to feed them.

Ghana should stop seeing sanitation only as something on which government spends money. Sanitation can become an industry. A modern national sanitation system requires environmental health professionals, engineers, waste collectors, drainage crews, equipment operators, laboratory technicians, recycling workers, software developers, data analysts, mechanics, compost producers, environmental educators and entrepreneurs. It creates demand for locally manufactured bins, protective equipment, collection equipment, construction materials and sanitation technologies. Recycling creates secondary raw materials. Organic waste can support compost production and appropriate energy applications. Technology companies can build systems for logistics, reporting, mapping and monitoring. Universities and technical institutions can develop new sanitation technologies appropriate to Ghanaian conditions. Small businesses can participate throughout the value chain. Government procurement should therefore be structured, where economically and technically reasonable, to develop Ghanaian sanitation enterprises rather than permanently importing every component of the system. This reflects a wider principle of development: Public needs can become platforms for productive employment when government deliberately builds the institutions, skills and markets required to meet them. Ghana has many unmet social and local-government needs at the same time that many citizens need productive work. These two problems should sometimes be allowed to solve each other.

Modern sanitation management should be measurable. We will progressively introduce appropriate technology including: digital mapping of dumping hotspots, drains and sanitation infrastructure; GPS-supported monitoring of waste collection operations; digital inspection and maintenance records; public reporting systems for overflowing waste, blocked drains and illegal dumping; data-assisted route planning for waste collection; appropriate drone and remote-sensing technologies for monitoring vulnerable coastlines, wetlands and waterways; and public dashboards showing sanitation performance. Technology will not replace sanitation workers. It will make their work more productive. And the technology itself will create opportunities for Ghanaian engineers, programmers, technicians, researchers and entrepreneurs.

Every Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assembly should know the sanitation condition of the communities under its jurisdiction. Citizens should know it too. A national sanitation performance framework will therefore measure indicators such as household sanitation access, refuse collection coverage, illegal dumping hotspots, drain maintenance, environmental-health inspections, coastal cleanliness where applicable, and resolution of reported sanitation failures. Results should be published periodically through a District Sanitation Scorecard. This is not intended to humiliate poorly performing districts. It is intended to identify where assistance is required, recognise improvement, expose persistent administrative failure and allow citizens to see whether conditions are actually changing. Government works better when performance becomes visible.

Sanitation requires institutional memory. Ghana should develop and strengthen a professional environmental-health and sanitation service whose technical responsibilities continue regardless of changes in political administration. Training, certification, career development, inspection standards and data management should become progressively more professional. Sanitation cannot restart every four years. Governments change. The Republic continues. Our institutions must therefore be designed to continue performing their duties regardless of who occupies political office.

Infrastructure alone cannot keep Ghana clean. Citizenship matters. Children should grow up understanding that the street, beach, market, river and drain belong collectively to all of us. Sanitation and environmental responsibility should therefore be strengthened within practical civic education. Children should learn why drains must not become refuse channels; why plastics discarded upstream eventually reach rivers and seas; why handwashing matters; why waste separation can create economic value; and why protecting public property is an obligation of citizenship. The objective is not merely to produce cleaner school compounds. It is to raise generations for whom responsible sanitation behaviour is normal.

Enforcement is necessary. But its sequence matters. Government should not create impossible conditions and then punish citizens for failing to overcome them. Where communities lack reasonable sanitation alternatives, our first response should therefore be infrastructure, education and access. Once reasonable alternatives exist, however, responsibility changes. Deliberate dumping into drains, waterways, beaches and public spaces cannot continue without consequence. Businesses, institutions and wealthy offenders must face the law just as ordinary citizens do. Enforcement must be predictable, proportionate and impartial. Every Ghanaian has a right to dignified sanitation and a corresponding responsibility to protect the public environment.

Ghana does not need to copy another country. But Ghana should never be too proud to learn. Rwanda's sustained attention to sanitation, community participation and local implementation provides useful African experience, even as Rwanda itself continues working toward universal sanitation access. Other countries and cities offer lessons in recycling, wastewater treatment, municipal financing, waste collection technology and environmental enforcement. We should study what works, reject what does not suit Ghana, improve what can be improved, and build systems appropriate to our own Republic. The important lesson is not that another country is inherently cleaner than Ghana. It is that African societies can transform their public environment when institutions, infrastructure and civic responsibility reinforce one another. If it can be done elsewhere in Africa, there is no reason Ghana cannot do it—and do it in our own way.

No serious sanitation policy should pretend that transformation is free. The programme must therefore be phased and costed. Financing can combine central government investment, strengthened district financing, carefully designed user charges where appropriate, development financing, private-sector participation, producer responsibility arrangements, recycling revenues and concessional financing for qualifying household improvements. Major projects should be subjected to transparent procurement and value-for-money assessment. The objective is not to announce hundreds of projects simultaneously. It is to establish a programme Ghana can finance, construct, maintain and progressively expand. A project we cannot maintain is not development. It is deferred failure.

Sanitation cannot be separated from drainage, flooding, wetlands, waterways and land-use planning. Waste thrown into a drain becomes a drainage problem. A blocked drain becomes a flooding problem. Floodwater mixing with human waste becomes a public-health problem. Polluted waterways eventually become a coastal and marine problem. This policy therefore complements the broader land-use, waterway and flood-management framework I have proposed. Different ministries and agencies may administer different pieces of the problem. Nature does not recognise those administrative boundaries. Government must therefore coordinate across them.

The objective is not simply a cleaner Accra. It is a cleaner Republic. Success means progressively reaching the point where: every Ghanaian household has reasonable access to dignified sanitation; public toilets are clean, safe and properly maintained; refuse collection reaches communities reliably; waste becomes an input for new industries wherever economically feasible; drains carry water rather than rubbish; food markets and fish-processing areas meet appropriate hygiene standards; district sanitation performance is publicly measurable; illegal dumping becomes unusual rather than normal; sanitation creates businesses and productive employment; and Ghanaian children grow up expecting cleanliness as the ordinary condition of their country. That transformation will take time. But lasting national development has always required persistence.

The disturbing images that brought renewed attention to this problem should not become an invitation to ridicule Ghana or condemn our people. They should become an invitation to build. We have inherited a sanitation challenge accumulated over decades. Successive governments and local authorities have made efforts, some of which have improved conditions, but the persistence and scale of the problem show that Ghana still requires a more integrated and enduring national system. My purpose is therefore not to conduct an argument about who first failed. My purpose is to help establish the system through which Ghana finally succeeds. Imagine our coastline without mountains of refuse. Imagine communities where no woman or child has to search for an unsafe place to answer a basic human need. Imagine drains carrying rainwater instead of plastics. Imagine sanitation companies employing thousands of young Ghanaians. Imagine recycling industries turning yesterday's refuse into tomorrow's raw materials. Imagine fishermen and fish processors working beside clean landing sites worthy of the food they provide the nation. Imagine visitors encountering clean towns and cities—and Ghanaians regarding that cleanliness not as something remarkable, but simply as normal. That Ghana is possible. And building it is not primarily a question of national wealth. It is a question of national organisation, sustained investment, responsible citizenship and political will. Roads move people. Electricity powers industry. Water sustains life. Sanitation protects every one of them. The permanent duty of government is not merely to administer today's Republic, but to build a stronger one for tomorrow.

Short Statement "The sanitation conditions being exposed along parts of Ghana's coastline should trouble us, but they should not cause us to condemn our people. They should cause us to build better systems. Sanitation is national infrastructure. My approach will begin with household sanitation, reliable public facilities, waste collection, clean fish-landing sites and stronger district capacity, and extend through recycling, technology, professional environmental-health services and fair enforcement. This transformation will also create work. Ghana needs sanitation engineers, environmental-health officers, recycling enterprises, collection services, technicians, software developers, equipment operators and many other workers and businesses. Government must provide reasonable infrastructure; citizens must protect it; businesses must obey environmental standards; and the law must apply fairly to everyone. Roads move people. Electricity powers industry. Water sustains life. Sanitation protects every one of them. A cleaner Ghana is achievable, and we should build it together." — Harrison Mensah Adiko