A tale of clean cities: Insights for planning urban sanitation from Kumasi, Ghana, 2016. WaterAid.
Key learning points
- Sanitation progress in Kumasi has been a long-term effort championed by a technically strong municipal Waste Management Department, supported by a wide range of development partners.
- Despite some political consensus around the importance of sanitation, and partly due to inadequacy of monitoring systems, financial support has remained low, limiting progress.
- Open defecation has been almost eliminated through the expansion of public toilets, prioritised at the expense of private toilets because of housing constraints.
- Enabling policies catalysed private sector investment, improving management of public toilets and service levels across the sanitation service chain.
- Disparities remain in terms of reach and quality of these services, which are poor in low-income areas.
- Sanitation planning exercises helped forge a shared vision on how to advance towards sustainable service delivery.
- The quality of these ‘learning by doing’ planning processes was more influential than were the resulting plans.