By Joyce Kantam Kolamong
Water is Life
Imagine living without access to potable water and toilet facilities in a crowded community of institution of health trainees whose main products would be assigned to teach members of the public how to manage their health.
Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) for every institution is critical, especially institutions set up to train the human resource needs of a country such as Ghana. It is one of the pivotal endearing, and enigmatic principles in raising and maintaining social cohesion in wellbeing and welfare.
This has been reinforced by global education for all strategies highlighting how WASH in schools improve access to education and learning outcomes, particularly for girls. It provides safe, inclusive, and equitable learning environment for all, which invariably reconnects learning outcomes to practice.
Health, it has been computed to be wealth, and people who charn the health education should be healthy enough to have the confidence to deliver on their assignment.
Contrary to these universal acknowledgements for WASH, the management and students of Community Health Training College at the Wamale campus in Tamale, in the Northern Region, have been forcefully entrenched in a delima of hopelessness and endurance. To see drop of water from the school’s tap has become a rare sight to behold, even though it is connected to the Ghana Water Company Limited main pipeline. It is intriguing to know that a school that teaches public health and preventive care lacks access to basic necessities such as water.
When GBCNews interviewed management and student leadership about how the institution was dealing with the scarcity of water flow, it was conclusive that there was chronic hopelessness in the school’s publics over water supply from the Ghana Water Company to the school with an unfriendly water table from options to drill and sink borehole in the school.
Background
The Tamale Community Health Training College was established in 1960 as the first community health training school in Ghana. The purpose of training the community health nurses was to ensure that they provided preventive health services to communities. The school started with 20 female student nurses and currently has a student population of 841, comprising 623 females and 280 males. As the student’s population increased, the infrastructure at the school became inadequate to accommodate them. The school management has to acquire 133 acres of land for its new campus at Wamale, in Tamale.
The school runs three programmes, namely, Registered Public Health Nursing, and Top-Up programmes. It is regulated professionally by the Nursing and Midwifery Council and accredited by the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission. Like any tertiary institution, the Tamale Community Health Training College is confronted with challenges. Notable among them is the lack of accessible water. GBCNews has information that there is a Ghana Water Company pipeline passing through the school, yet taps go dry throughout a whole term or even the whole of an academic year. Students simply rely on the services of water tankers and rainwater. The situation has resulted in some of the students practicing open defecation.
Health Risks and Professional training
The students and management of the school are clearly confronted with a problem; they have relentlessly searched and combed for solution but failed. It is baffling to seek to understand how a public health training institution will have to grapple with a basic necessity of life such as water and remain to train students to graduate to educate members of the public on public health, preventive care, and other associated health needs.
Safe and readily available water is vital for public health. It is therefore questionable how students from this institution practice preventive care when they themselves have no access to potable water for their wellbeing. The situation of the students and management obviously defeats the mandate of the school to produce human resources in nursing to pursue educating members of the public on preventive health and related healthcare needs.
SDGs and Health Workers
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, which emphasises the need to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all’, confirms the importance of water and sanitation. However, this is far from reaching its target by 2030, given the water situation at schools, particularly Tamale Community Health Nurses Training College. GBC News interacted with some of the student nurses, who complained bitterly about the lack of water flow to the school, which has become an evil affecting contact hours and academic work. Some female students expressed how the situation makes it difficult for them to manage their menstrual periods.
One of the students bemoaned, “We don’t normally have water since we came to this school. Sometimes it takes two weeks without water, and you have to buy water from the tankers and sometimes if they want to sell the water, a can is three Ghana cedis. We also fetch water from the dam, and because it’s unclean, we buy alum to keep it clean.”
A final-year student further indicated, “As ladies, we all know that we have to manage our menstruation, and we need enough water to be able to take care of ourselves. And because of the lack of water, it disorganises everything; you need to go for miles to get water since one needs to do everything to get water to manage the menses. Sometimes we buy sachet water to wash down.”
The SRC President, Wuni Mohammed, could not hide his frustration.
“Since we don’t have water, our sanitation situation is nothing to write home about, and because of the lack of toilets, we resort to open defecation. And we, as public health nurses, go about preaching preventive health; here lies the case: we ourselves are not practicing it. It will look shameful when we ourselves as student nurses, we are engaging in open defecation and you want to educate somebody on the contrary. You will look stupid before the person.”
GBC News observed that colorful yellow gallons popularly known as “Kuffour gallons”, greeted the news team when they visited the Girls’ dormitory. With names embossed on some of the gallons and a tight padlock to keep water safe from the reach of intruders, the gallons were well arranged in front of every room. The sight of more than 100 gallons sends a strong signal of how the students are struggling with water.
Latifa Issifu is the Women’s Commissioner of the school.
“As you can see, we have many yellow gallons that students use to store water. Normally, during raining season, the situation is a bit okay, but in the dry season, we have to source water outside. We also have nice and clean washroom, which we unfortunately have to lock because we don’t have water to flush, so we want to appeal to the government to come to our aid.”
One serious challenge observed by the news team was the bad nature of the school’s toilet, coupled with the absence of handwashing facilities on the school compound. This reinforces the sanitation situation and the need for the government and relevant stakeholders to act swiftly. Access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), remains central to the Sustainable Development Goals, where access to these services was recognised as a human right at the 2015 UN General Assembly.
School Management
The Principal of the school, Comfort Kona, said the school spends huge amount of money to ensure students are supplied with water, indicating that the school’s coffers is hugely drained in this quest. She emphasised that the management of the school has written and appealed to relevant stakeholders for support.
“And as we speak, we don’t get water from Ghana Water Company, and if there is a way, we can get support. We have engaged one or two NGOS to drill a borehole, but that has not happened yet. As we speak, buying water from the water tankers is a drain on us, and we would have wished that if we can get philanthropists, NGOs, opinion and traditional leaders to come to our aid by providing water services or toilet facilities that do not require the use of too much water, it would have been a relief to the school and students”.
Community Opinion
The Assembly member for Wamale Electoral Area, Abu Ziblim, acknowledged the challenges residents faced in getting water for their daily activities, especially for management and students at the Community Health Nurses’ School. He confirmed there were existing pipelines running through all the adjoining communities, including the nurses’ training school; however, water hardly flowed in the area. He said several visits to the GWCL to address the problem have not yielded many results.
Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL)
When the news team visited GWCL to find out the peculiar problem at Wamale, management transported the team to its treatment plant site at Nawuni in the Kumbungu District to be abreast of the situation. It came up that sand-winning along the White Volta tends to pollute the water, which makes production difficult and expensive.
According to the Northern Regional Director of GWCL, Stephen Amihere Mensah, “On a normal day without light out, GWCL is able to produce 32, 000 metre cube and with power interruptions, we produce 30,000.”
He added that the company’s water pump often breaks down due to sandwinning and when the water is polluted, it spends huge amount of money to buy chemicals to purify for consumption.
“There are four machines for water purification, three works while one is on stand-by and the company spends 7,000 Ghana cedis in fixing a broken machine,” Mr Mensah noted. He however indicated that the Water Resource Commission together with the Catholic Relief Services (CRS), was working to move the Sand Winners downstream, and expressed the hope that the move would be initiated next year, 2024.
Recommendations and Conclusion
Today, making sure schools have proper hygiene facilities for their students are vital to keeping students healthy. However, majority of schools in developing countries, such as Ghana, face considerable barriers to providing these amenities. The global effort to achieve sanitation and water for all by 2030 is extending beyond the household to include institutional settings such as schools, healthcare facilities, and workplaces. This has been reinforced by global education for all strategies highlighting how water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in schools improve access to education and learning outcomes, particularly for girls, by providing a safe, inclusive, and equitable learning environment for all.
The need for the government to prioritise mechanised boreholes for senior high schools without pipe-borne water is imperative while promoting good hygiene practices among students, especially females.
Furthermore, if the government and relevant authorities could also prioritise other alternative toilet facilities that use less water, the situation could be addressed.
