By Anthony Adongo Apubeo
Bolgatanga, Sept. 25, GNA – The Belim Wusa Development Agency (BEWDA), a civil society organisation, is empowering community climate change advocacy champions in the Upper East Region to generate evidence and engage duty bearers to demand climate-resilient Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) facilities.
The initiative seeks to equip community advocates with skills to identify and document the impacts of climate change on WASH, mobilise their communities and engage authorities and other stakeholders to address the challenges.
The project, dubbed “Civil Society Leadership Mobilising for better WASH project” is being funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) through WaterAid Ghana, a WASH-focused organisation.
Currently, BEWDA and its partners were working towards training at least 100 community advocates across five districts in the region including Nabdam, Bongo, the Kassena-Nankana West and Bawku West Districts and Kassena-Nankana Municipality.
The main objective is to build a movement of community advocates capable of generating evidence, engaging duty bearers and sustaining advocacy for solutions to climate change-related challenges affecting WASH and community development.
Mr Sebastian Agumah Mbabugri, Project Lead of BEWDA, said this during an engagement with community climate change advocacy champions from Nayorigo and Zorko-Awaa communities in the Bongo District.
He said climate change had become a reality that communities experienced regularly, making it necessary to build their capacity to identify its impacts and lead efforts to strengthen community resilience.
“Our duty as civil society in mobilising our communities and the people that we serve in solving climate change-related problems and the impact of climate change on WASH and other related activities is for us to closely work with the communities and build the capacities of our communities to be able to lead the change that we want for better WASH,” he said.
Mr Mbabugri said the training was designed to equip selected community members with the skills to generate evidence on climate change impacts on WASH and use such evidence to engage duty bearers, civil society organisations and development agencies.
He said the programme was also intended to enable communities to identify ways of adapting to and mitigating the effects of climate change while ensuring that vulnerable groups were protected.
He explained that the communities have been introduced to scorecarding tool that would enable the champions to assess WASH challenges from the community’s perspective and generate evidence that could be replicated through wider community engagements.
Mr Emmanuel Abariga, Head of Programmes, BEWDA, said duty bearers had a responsibility to establish systems and provide facilities that protected communities and vulnerable groups from the effects of climate change and urged the champions to hold duty bearers accountable for addressing the climate-related challenges confronting their communities.
He identified assembly members, unit committee members, chiefs and elders, District Chief Executives, Regional Ministers and Members of Parliament, among others, as duty bearers at different levels because of their ability to influence decisions and facilitate development.
He said authorities must pay greater attention to the provision of appropriate WASH facilities in schools and health facilities, saying addressing WASH gaps would contribute to quality healthcare and community development.
Ms Blessing Aloko, a resident of Nayorigo, indicated that 90 per cent of the households in her community did not have household latrine, compelling people to defecate in the open and pledged to lead advocacy for the situation to change.
Ms Kate Agana, a resident from Zorko-Awaa, also lauded the training and that many women travelled nearly an hour in some communities to search for water and appealed for support to get more water sources for the community.
GNA
Edited by Caesar Abagali /Kenneth Odeng Adade
Reporter: Anthony Adongo Apubeo
Reporter’s email: [email protected]