Nii Adjei Tawiah, Municipal Chief Executive, Korle Klottey Municipal Assembly (KoKMA), says the Assembly is considering the issuance of tags to hawkers for easy identification and engagement.

He said the initiative had become necessary due to the contribution of hawkers to the growth of the local economy.

Nii Tawiah, in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA), said the Assembly had recognised hawkers as key stakeholders, thus the decision to engage them on their economic activities, payment of levies and how to keep the city centre and street corners clean.

He said poor sanitation remained a major challenge for the Assembly and confident collaboration with stakeholders, including hawkers would help address the situation.

The MCE said despite the strategic location of the Assembly, it was having issues with raising enough internally generated fund for projects and hopeful the engagement of players in the informal sector, especially traders would reposition the Assembly for growth.

Nii Tawiah said issues with streetism, non-payment of property rates, market tolls and security, were being addressed.

“We believe that over the years, these issues have not been handled properly but with the introduction of new approaches a lot of them would be corrected with time,” he said.

Nii Tawiah said the Assembly was contracting some private waste management companies to manage the sanitary situation at the lorry stations and markets and called for support from all.

“We have successfully profiled all traders in our markets and gradually, we will sign them up onto one of the private service providers, so that they can pay for their refuse to be collected on daily basis.

“If we do not do this one of the problems that we will face is that apart from not getting the refuse dumped at the appropriate places, traders will also fail to register with private contractors because they would be charged higher fees,” he said.

The MCE said the Assembly was cleaning up the data for property rate because for a about ten years, changes had not been made, saying, “We will gradually increase some of these rates.”