Stakeholders push for independent sanitation regulator – This will block GH¢6.2bn losses
A growing consensus has emerged among policy thinkers, researchers, private sector actors, several parliamentary select committees and development partners that Ghana’s sanitation challenge is not merely an environmental inconvenience; it is an economic emergency.
At a high-level stakeholder forum in Accra, convened by the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) of the University of Ghana, in collaboration with Environment for Development and supported by Channel 1 TV, participants strongly backed the establishment of an independent sanitation regulatory authority.
Their reasoning was based on the fact that the country’s Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector operates without a central regulator to coordinate policy, standardise operations and enforce compliance.
Institutions function, private companies invest, metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies budget annually, but the system lacks a unified supervisory body.
The Head of Climate Action and Sustainability and Partnerships at the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Chieftaincy, Godfred Boadi, described the absence of a regulator between practitioners, stakeholders and the supervising ministry as deeply unfortunate, stating that sanitation remained the only major sector operating without such oversight.
Economic imbalance
Presenting findings of a study, the immediate past Director of ISSER and Principal Investigator, Professor Peter Quartey, underscored the scale of the imbalance.
“Ghana suffers approximately 30 times more from the consequences of poor waste management than it spends to prevent them,” he pointed out.
The study estimates that annual health and productivity losses exceeded GH¢6.2 billion, including about GH¢5.58 billion in direct medical expenses.
In contrast, metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies collectively spent roughly GH¢180.2 million each year on waste management.
The Lead Investigator, Dr Kwame Adjei-Mantey, further explained that sanitation-related diseases such as malaria, cholera and typhoid resulted in 31.9 million lost work and school days annually, alongside an estimated 107,222 premature deaths.
The cost extends beyond dirty drains, affecting household incomes, school attendance, workforce productivity and national output.
Sanitation, economic strategy
Contrary to the perception that sanitation is a fiscal burden, the study positions it as a high-return investment.
It found out that increasing spending to the lower-middle-income benchmark of GH¢1,028 per tonne of waste could yield GH¢556 in annual benefits for every GH¢1 invested.
Between 2025 and 2032, projected annual economic benefits range from GH¢58.1 billion to GH¢67.2 billion.
The same investment could reduce sanitation-related morbidity by 97.4 per cent and mortality by 81 per cent.
Stakeholders argued that such returns justified the urgent establishment of a regulatory authority to oversee standards, coordinate policy, integrate informal operators and ensure accountability across the sector.
Targeted reform, institutional strengthening
Participants recommended prioritising sanitation hotspots such as dense urban slums and peri-urban communities, formalising informal waste collectors, strengthening local governance capacity and integrating sanitation data into budgeting frameworks.
Sanitation, they emphasised, must shift from being treated as residual environmental spending to being recognised as a frontline public health and economic development investment.
By the end of the forum, the message was clear that without regulatory reform, increased funding alone may not deliver optimal results.
For many in attendance, the establishment of a sanitation regulatory authority did not only represent a bureaucratic expansion but a structural correction.
In addition, there must be a consistently transparent funding source that would effectively fund waste management and sanitation, and the authority should be regulated in such a way that it is able to generate revenue to sustain the sector’s operation.
