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Madam Cecilia Abena Dapaah, Minister for Sanitation and Water Resources, has said the Ministry is making the appropriate effort to inject efficiency in the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector.

Among the changes being made, the Minister said, are the implementation of the Operation Vanguard to stem water pollution as well as protect water bodies being jointly undertaken by the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) and Water Resources Commission (WRC).

Madam Dapaah said this in a speech read for her by Mr Anthony Mensah, Director of Sanitation, on Thursday at the launch of the Rural Water Sanitation Hygiene (RWASH) by PLAN International, Ghana and its partners.

Madam Dapaah said the Community Water and Sanitation Agency (CWSA) has also commissioned some reforms within the rural water sector with the aim of employing professionalism to consolidate the gains made in the past.

“All these and many others are part of the larger plans and institutional re-organisation of the WASH sector to align with the new thinking required by the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Six,” she said.

Madam Dapaah said this is to ensure sustainable management of water, sanitation and hygiene for all by 2030.

She said the Ministry would also ensure transparency by properly monitoring and evaluating Non-Governmental Organisations in the sector to make certain that they worked within the policy and priorities of the Ministry.

“Plans are far advanced to re-activate the WASH sector working group which brings together senior staff of the Ministry to sit with civil society organisations and international NGOs on a monthly basis,” she said.

Madam Dapaah said to deal with the challenges facing sector players in employing different approaches in Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), the Ministry developed the Rural Sanitation Model and Strategy (RSMS) as a guideline.

She said the Ministry further developed a certification and verification protocol for quality in open defecation free status and put in place a Basic Sanitation Information System and district CLTS scale-up planning tools called “DROPs” for the sector.