The Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Environment is putting in place the necessary legal and regulatory framework, to ensure that sanitation laws of Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies are not only rigidly enforced, but that fines are deterrent enough. Mr Kwadwo Adjei-Darko, Sector Minister, said this in a speech read for him at the opening of a two-day 2007 Annual Performance Review and Planning Meeting of the environmental health and sanitation directorate at Abesim, near Sunyani. The Minister said to prove the Ministry’s commitment to ensuring proper sanitation discipline in communities, 2,000 sanitation guards were deployed in the 138 metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies to assist environmental health officers in education and law enforcement. He noted with regret that more than 60 percent of morbidity cases at the health facilities in the country were malaria and diarrhoeal diseases, which also accounted for most infant mortalities. Mr Adjei Darko stated that it was against this background that the Ministry had prioritized environmental sanitation as one of its key areas of action, since it was a basic function of the Assemblies. He explained that though the environmental sanitation policy mandated the Ministry and the Assemblies to manage sanitation in the country, there was the need for individuals, development partners, NGOs, civil society and corporate bodies to effectively play their respective roles and responsibilities as expected. The Minister expressed concern about the absence of reliable data on sanitation, which he said was also a hindrance to effective proper planning, stressing that, as part of the process of developing the national and district environmental strategy and action plans, data on sanitation was being compiled at all the Assemblies to establish baseline data for sanitation. “It is time for us to move away from the traditional ways of waste management, and rather see waste as a resource that can be used to create wealth and generate employment opportunities”, Mr Adjei-Darko emphasized. Mr Adjei-Darko commended the Royal Netherlands Embassy, UNICEF, World Bank, DANIDA, DFID, Water Aid, Zoomlion, CONIWASS and CWSA for their support and facilitating roles in ensuring proper waste management. Mr Ignatius Baffour-Awuah, Brong-Ahafo Regional Minister, noted that though a lot of resources had been channelled into the sanitation sub-sector by the government and its development partners, very little impact had been made and called for increased monitoring at all levels of service implementation. He noted that poor environmental sanitation management would not only undermine the achievement of the targets of the Millennium development goals and the growth and poverty reduction strategy of the government but that achieving a middle income status by the year 2015 would also be a mirage. Mr Baffour-Awuah challenged the participants to come up with appropriate and low cost sanitation technologies for the management of the increasing waste. Source: GNA