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In this first clip, Vida reflects on the successes of the Ghana water sector and the trade-off between reaching the unreached and sustaining what is already there.

TitleThe Ghana water sector: the improvements made and the trade-off between coverage and sustainability
Publication TypeVideo
Year of Publication2012
Abstract

Vida Duti, Triple-S Ghana leader, heads a team of ten people who are hosted by the Community Water and Sanitation Agency. In seven short video clips, Vida talks about how the Ghanaian water sector is moving towards sustainable rural water service delivery.

Full Text

Over the last fifteen years tremendous improvements have been made in Ghana, in terms of water service coverage and people's access to services. In the 1990s rural water coverage was only around 27%, this was 62% in 2001.

Some years back, in the rural areas most people relied on streams. Those who could afford it had self-supply systems in their homes. Vida remembers well all the boreholes in her village, Tarkwa, where she grew up. 'Today if you go to Tarkwa you will see that almost all homes now have access to piped water in their homes'. Now, most villages that have more than 5000 inhabitants have small town water systems. Smaller villages have either mechanised boreholes or have piped borehole systems in their homes.

Overall, stakeholders in Ghana agree that water services need to be sustained. It is not just about providing infrastructure. The ultimate goal is to provide people with water and reliable services. The challenge is how to go about this. Sustainability is being constrained by limited resources. The dilemma is to put either all resources into new infrastructure and reach everybody, w6ith the risk that facilities will break down, or invest in sustainability of existing facilities and leave others with no service. Vida thinks 'it is neither here, nor there. It is about how you do the numbers and how you balance your investments in such a way that, whatever you have done is sustained and to make sure that the little resources are maximized.'

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