He said the figure, which was arrived at after a study, could even be higher, judging from the high patronage of public toilets across the country.

“The Ghana Statistical Service carried out the Ghana Living Standards Survey from October 2012 to September 2013. When they did that study and checked what we do in Ghana, they said that in 2013, a good percentage of the 85 per cent of people who do not have toilets in their homes use public toilets. And in one year they spent GH¢1.3 billion paying 20 pesewas, 30 pesewas, 50 pesewas, to use the public toilet”, he stated.

Mr Esseku added that after he had done an analysis to determine the veracity of the figures, bearing in mind that about 30 per cent of Ghanaians; approximately eight million people, patronise public toilets and pay approximately 50 pesewas a day, the figure could have been GH¢2.7 billion and not GH¢1.3 billion.

The WASH expert was speaking yesterday at a World Toilet Day conference organised by the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development (MLGRD) on the theme: “Sustainable Sanitation Systems and Technologies in Ghana.

The conference heard the results of a technology assessment framework (TAF) on a sanitation facility technology known as the Ecosafe Toilet and a presentation on sanitation planning and feasible sanitation infrastructure options for urban areas.

Cost of poor sanitation

Facilitating the conference which attracted WASH experts and engineers from non-governmental organisations (NGOs),  civil society organisations (CSOs) and local government authorities, Mr Esseku said while globally one in 10 people had no choice but to defecate in the open, according to a WHO/UNICEF 2015 report, in Ghana about two in 10 persons (19 per cent) resorted to open defecation daily.

He said due to poor sanitation and the lack of access to potable water, Ghana incurred a cost of $240 million a year. “So in urban areas 20 per cent of people have access to sanitation while in rural areas, only nine per cent have access. If you put all together, only 15 per cent of people in Ghana have access to improved sanitation,” he said.

“In my opinion, if you take the GH¢1.3 billion in 2013 and covert it into dollars, you get $400 million, and over four years, $400 million multiplied by four will be $1.6 billion. So by now the people would have paid for the toilets if we were building toilets in everybody’s house,” Mr Esseku said.

Technology, not the complete answer

Delivering the keynote address at the conference, a former Vice Chancellor of the University of Energy and Natural Resources, Sunyani, Prof. Esi Awuah, stated that technology alone could not solve the country’s sanitation challenges.

She said several factors militated against proper sanitation and hygiene practices in the country, such as the absence of hygiene education and community participation in searching for solutions, the land tenure system, funding and the absence of standards and guidelines.

Prof. Awuah also said the failure to consider the culture and attitude of a community when thinking up solutions and sanitation facility designs, as well as the absence of an operation and maintenance culture, all worked against Ghana’s desire to ensure sanitation coverage.

She recommended several ways to surmount the challenges, including government’s financing of research, developing water pressure systems between three and five litres instead of the current 15 litres used in water closet systems and the creation of waste management departments in all metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies

New toilet technology

A presentation on an assessment done on a sanitation technology, the Ecosafe toilet, showed a lot of flaws that needed rectification before widespread use of the technology that has already been piloted in Adentan in Accra.

Some of the flaws were unsafe discharge into the environment, no standardised design and the water table’s susceptibility to contamination with the use of the Ecosafe design.

The Head of the Waste Management Department of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), Ing Anthony Mensah, who chaired the conference, said while the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) had treated Ghana with kids gloves because it only tasked the country to halve the number of people without access to improved sanitation, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) presented a greater challenge because it asked for total access.

Two lady engineers of the Local Government Ministry, Ing. Henrietta Osei-Tutu and Ing Bertha Dartey, who jointly made a presentation on sanitation planning and feasible infrastructure options for urban areas, called for decentralised waste water systems to help Ghana meet its SDG target on sanitation.