The $150 million World Bank-funded Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) Sanitation and Water Project will benefit from an extension and another opportunity to reach some targets despite no significant undertaking with a year to go.
On the Citi Breakfast Show, the project coordinator, George Asiedu revealed that the World Bank had agreed to extend in lieu of the challenges the program has encountered.
“The World Bank was actually responsive to some the issues we bring up for discussions and so the World Bank at this level has agreed with us to extend the project because having identified the challenges and having made some progress towards dealing with it, they have seen the light at the end of the tunnel.”
The coordinators acknowledged the project had so fallen short of expectations and noted that they may not have gotten some aspects of the project right.
No master plan three years in
Breaking down some aspects of the project on the, Mr. Asiedu explained that the project had largely been marching time because it is yet to formulate a master plan for implementation, which they said is projected to cost $3.1 million after the two year formulation period.
Furthermore, a consultant is required to work on the master plan and Mr, Asiedu insisted that it would take a year to recruit a consultant, in line with procurement processes in Ghana.
That master plan is seeking to provide the road plan that will be used to manage solid waste and “until we come up with a programme or a plan which will be acceptable to all stakeholders, we cannot even put money or any capital investment in any intervention to deal with solid waste management,” he explained.
“So what we need to do now with the GAMA project is to come up with an integrated master plan. We are using the word integrated because hitherto, we used to have master plans for solid waste, liquid waste and drainage but we realised that these separate plans are related.”
But once the plan is ready, Mr. Asiedu said: “they will begin to put in the capital investment to implement the plan.”
In the meantime, GAMA project cannot do anything regarding the construction of landfill sites, the collection of solid waste, the treatment of solid waste as required by the components of the project.
The sanitation aspect of the GAMA Water and Sanitation Project is to take $100 million of the money provided by the World Bank, and a critical part of the project is the provision of toilet facilities.
But according to Mr. Asiedu, “until the midterm review, the project made provision for a $100 million but none of the amount was to be used to construct toilets.”
“What we needed to do was to do sensitization, create demand and educate the people on the need to have toilets in their homes,” the project coordinator added.
The GAMA project was to see the building of school toilets, a faecal treatment plant as well as the carrying out drainage improvement in identified areas that are susceptible to flooding.
Despite the provisions being targeted at low-income Ghanaians in the GAMA area, Mr. Asiedu revealed the average cost of the toilets they were providing is GHc 4,000.
At the midterm review, the project found it necessary to negotiate this aspect of the project with the World Bank and they agreed to a 50 percent subsidy to aid the potential consumers.
So far, Mr. Asiedu reported that 9,000 people submitted their names for toilet construction but only 1,300 have paid some money “and out of 1,300, we have been able to fully complete 900 because only 900 have been able to come out with the 50 percent.”
The $150 million provide the project will not be enough, according to Mr. Asiedu, as “but we want to exhaust what we have before we can even ask them for any funds.”
“I can tell you that the funds available may not be enough. We need more and as we sit, we have a lot of the table that we want to do but because of constraints with funding, we cannot do that. We will be able to exhaust these funds and we may need even more.”
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(Via: CitiFM Online Ghana)
