A toilet facility is not accessible to around 1.5 million Ghanaian homes, according to the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS).
These households continue to practice open defecation, an activity abhorred by the state as it puts the country’s sanitation in jeopardy.
According to GSS, “the 1.5 million figure represents 17.7% of the household population.”
The prevalence of open defecation is more than three times greater in rural areas (31.3%) than in urban areas (8.9%).
The GSS’s 2021 Population and Housing Census General Report on Water and Sanitation also noted that
“Point of defecation is primarily bush/open field/gutter for households without access to a toilet facility (1,380,720 households), followed by beach/water bodies (61,401 households).”
In comparison to other years, the figure reported this year has decreased, it was added.
“The percentage of households without access to toilet facilities was 19.3% in 2010 and 20.2% in 2000 indicating a reduction of 2.5 percentage points in the prevalence of open defecation over the 21-year period.”
Eight out of every ten homes practice open defecation, the report also noted.
The regions with the largest percentage of households without access to toilet facilities are the Upper East (80%) and North East (79.7%).
More than 100,000 households in six regions – Northern (242,034), Upper East (180,797), Ashanti (111,306), Greater Accra (105,717), Volta (102,997), and Bono East—practice open defecation, according to the GSS (102,442).
This comes at a time when the world observes World Toilet Day on November 19, 2022.
According to the World Health Organisation, the world is on track to eliminate open defecation by 2030, if not by 2025, but historical rates of progress would need to double for the world to achieve universal coverage with basic sanitation services by 2030
Source: The Independent Ghana