The New Juaben North Municipal Assembly in the Eastern Region is urging the deployment of additional Environmental Health Officers and legal personnel to enforce sanitation by-laws, amid concerns over insufficient resources in the region.
Currently, only 20 out of 33 assemblies in the Eastern Region have prosecutors to enforce sanitation laws, while the region has just 452 Environmental Health Officers, averaging one officer for every 6,778 residents.
Addressing the media during the National Sanitation Day clean-up at Asokore and Effiduase, the MCE for New Juaben North, Samuel Adongo, highlighted the urgent need for more officers to ensure compliance with sanitation regulations.
“That we don’t have enough environmental officers and we are actually working on that to make sure that we get enough environmental task force or environmental officers so that we can go around the whole municipality to ensure that everybody is complying to sanitation issues so that we can prevent some of this kind of contamination and all that.
So we are working on that and hopefully very soon we will see our environmental officers moving from one area to the other, especially in homes and in front of shops to make sure that we don’t see more filths,” he stated.
Although participation in the clean-up exercise was low, volunteers helped dredge blocked drains, clear weeds, and remove plastic waste along streets. The MCE warned that shop owners and other defaulters who fail to participate will face sanctions.
“Those that failed to join us in the clean-up exercise, we have made arrangements with our environmental officer and for that matter we are going to serve all of them and the law will take it from there,” Adongo emphasized.
National Sanitation Day, observed on the first Saturday of every month, aims to improve hygiene and waste management across Ghana.
Source: Starrfm.com.gh/Kojo Ansah
