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Go BackWELL FACTSHEET - Regional Annex GhanaSchool Sanitation and Hygiene Education Author: Vincent Tay, TREND, February 2006 Quality Assurance: Marielle Snel and Myriam Sidibe Adequate
and well functioning school sanitation and hand
washing facilities play a major role in reducing the
incidence of diarrhoeal diseases and worm
infestations in the school environment. In Ghana, a
national Community Water and Sanitation Programme
has been put in place to improve health through the
provision of water and sanitation facilities with
hygiene promotion. Schools are one of the main
target groups for the programme. However, the gains
from the provision of these facilities are being
eroded by poor Operation and Maintenance (O&M)
practices. The
provision of basic water and sanitation facilities
is one of the first most important steps towards
developing a healthy school environment. Most of the
diseases that affect school age children in West
Africa are caused by the poor water and sanitation
infrastructure with accompanying poor hygiene
practices. Since the onset of the National Community
Water and Sanitation Programme in Ghana in the early
1990s, emphasis has been placed on assisting first
cycle schools (Primary & Junior Secondary –
that is children between age 6 and 15) own a school
latrine with a hand washing facility. The standard
facility provided across the country is the Kumasi
Ventilated Improved Pit (KVIP) latrine. This type of
latrine is designed to control odour and the
presence of houseflies in the latrine. The school pays 10% of the capital cost of the facility and the full cost of O&M whilst the Community Water & Sanitation Agency pays the remaining 90%. The school’s contribution is purely a cash contribution. It is expected that the 10% contribution and the cost of O&M would be taken out of the capitation grant provided to schools by the government. In the Eastern region alone, with DANIDA support, through the CWSA over 103 school latrines have been constructed and are in use.
By
virtue of the institutional arrangements towards
benefiting from programme support for a school
latrine, the important step of user education for
the beneficiary school is either overlooked or not
treated seriously. The result is that most of the
latrines that are presently in use are poorly kept
and a key function of the latrine to control flies
as a means of reducing the incidence of diarrhoea is
defeated and the school still remains an unsafe
place for the child. In a recent evaluation of
School Health Education Programme (SHEP) activities
in four districts of the Eastern region, the
majority of school KVIP latrines that were in use
either had anal cleansing materials in their
chambers or faecal matter could be seen somewhere in
the chambers of the latrine. The
institutional arrangement for the construction of
the school latrines empowers the District Assembly
(DA) to contract a private contractor to construct
the latrines. These contractors do not provide any
sort of user education to the beneficiary school
when the construction is completed. At the official
hand over of the facility to the school, the DA
invariably put a political twist to the event (the
District Chief Executive does the commissioning and
the programme is filled with political speeches) and
the important user education information to the
school is left out. Members of the District Water
and Sanitation Team (DWST) who are mandated to visit
beneficiary schools and provide backstopping support
in the use and maintenance of the facilities are not
able to visit many of the schools on a regular
basis. As a result, most schools start using their
latrines with very little user education on the
O&M of the latrine facility. For a majority of
the schools, the main opportunity they have to learn
about the latrine is during the Teacher Training
workshop in school health organized for the Head
teacher and the School Health Coordinator. This
workshop is usually conducted very early in the
process of acquiring the latrine, and in most cases,
even before construction of the latrine begins. Thus
by the time the latrine is in place and ready to
use, most of their knowledge and understanding of
the facility would be stale. Presently,
less than 2% of beneficiary schools have saved any
money or have immediate access to finances towards
minor and major repairs of the facility. In schools
where the facility needs some repairs on the
physical infrastructure, it takes many months before
this is done because there is no money for repairs.
During that period the facility (ies) remains out of
use.
The
presence of well functioning water and sanitation
facilities in schools is a major factor in reducing
the incidence of diarrhoeal diseases amongst school
pupils. Other factors like child friendliness and/or
girl friendliness of the facility may also be
motivations for increased use. To sustain the health
benefits of the facilities, it is essential that
SSHE facilities are operated and maintained properly
so that they are kept functional throughout the
school year. To
ensure effective operation and maintenance of the
latrines, detailed user education on the facility
should be made a key component of the handing-over
ceremony of the latrines.
A clear and comprehensive user education
programme should be prepared and all teachers must
be taken through it. When implemented at this time,
the user guidelines would still be fresh in
teacher’s minds and they can in turn pass these on
to the pupils. School Health Coordinators should
also be assisted to develop simple posters targeted
at the pupils and spelling out the user guidelines
for the latrines as they have been taught. The
production of these posters should be simple so that
School Health Coordinators can easily produce them
at the school level. The CWSA should also develop
simple illustrated brochures on the user guidelines
for the correct use and maintenance of the KVIP
latrine. These brochures should be distributed to
beneficiary schools and made available to the
pupils. Immediately, the school begins to use the facility, the pupils (especially the older ones) should be given the opportunity to develop their own routines for keeping the latrine clean. The School Health Coordinator should work closely with the pupils to develop a roster that distributes the cleaning of the latrine equitably among the pupils ensuring that girls especially are not unduly over burdened with the cleaning task. The cleaning roster agreed with the pupils should be endorsed by the school management and the School Health Committee. This and the maintenance schedules adopted by the school should form a major part of the school’s Facilities Management Plan (FMP) for the school latrine and hand washing facilities. The School Health Committee can then play a major role in monitoring the use of SSHE facilities in the school.
Financing
repairs and routine maintenance of the facility is
the next major threat to the sustainability of the
facility. The school is expected to bear the full
cost of operation and maintenance. Traditionally,
parents are levied annually and the money kept as a
revolving fund for the O&M of the facility.
However, with the introduction of the capitation
grant (2005) all such levies have been banned by the
government. The capitation grant as it stands now (˘30,000/pupil
= US$3.3) is not adequate to respond to the needs of
the school. Sanitation has always been a low
priority area for schools so in order to ensure that
funds are made readily available to support repairs
on SSHE facilities, the District School Health
Coordinator should monitor the condition of each
school latrine and hand washing facility through
half termly reports submitted by School Health
Coordinators and Circuit Supervisors reports. Once a
report reaches them of a school that has a broken
down facility they can immediately exert pressure on
the school management from the District Education
Office level to have the facility repaired out of
the terms capitation grant. Without this pressure,
the school management will delay the repairs for
other so called priority things. In the long term,
the DA and the District Education Office could
jointly agree on a percentage of the capitation
grant which should be devoted to SSHE and the DA
could contribute to that seeing that they have a
major role to play in development at the district
level. The
Ghana Education Service (GES) should liaise with
CWSA for accurate information on the correct O&M
of various latrine options and hand washing
facilities to include in their Head Teachers guide
for maintaining school facilities. It
is important that the operation and maintenance of
school sanitation and hand washing facilities is
given a high priority at the school level. The
school should be empowered financially to ensure
that water, sanitation and hand washing
infrastructure function properly all year round to
sustain the health benefits they bring to pupils. As
reflected in this fact sheet, although good strides
are being made, SSHE in Ghana still has a long way
to go to make it more effective and efficient.
This
Fact Sheet was developed by Vincent Tay, TREND Group
(April 2004) info@trend-gh.org,
veetay@boltblue.com
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