Safi Sana : water and sanitation provisions in urban slums : closing the loop : paper prepared for the West Africa Regional Sanitation and Hygiene Symposium, 10-12 Nov 2009, Accra, Ghana

Increased population growth coupled with rapid rural-urban migration is a major impediment to providing improved water and sanitation access in Ghana. In Accra, this situation is more critical particularly in densely populated low income settlements. These areas are characterized by poor people who earn less than GH¢3 (US$2) daily. The most common water and sanitation facilities are communal /public water and sanitation blocks, but in most cases these facilities are inadequate, expensive, over-stretched and in deplorable conditions. The lack of access to safe and reliable drinking water, sanitation facilities and poor hygienic practices is known to cause many health related risks especially among children. This situation threatens the development agenda of Ghana whilst derailing the country’s effort at achieving the Millennium Development Goal No. 7 of increasing access to water and basic sanitation facilities and also improving the livelihood of the slum dwellers. To find solutions and to accomplish the Millennium Development Goals, Safi Sana (Ghana) Ltd has introduced a two-folded approach to improve water and sanitation delivery whilst ensuring environmental sustainability by a business based approach based on franchise and joint ventures using a financial mix of grants and loans. Far from seeing public toilets as a major pollution source to the environment, Safi Sana envisage it as constituting a great centre of collecting resources and transforming them by centralized processing into biogas and organic fertilizer to serve the energy and agricultural needs of the country. With this innovation, Safi Sana closes the sanitation loop by linking sanitation, agriculture and energy to ensure a sustainable management of human waste and improved livelihood in Ghana (authors abstract)