| dc.description.abstract | The global sustainable development goals (SDG), as recently updated by the UN, still include: “Goal 6. Ensure access to water and sanitation for all. The issue of access to water and sanitation is the most prevalent in Africa. This study focuses on Ghana, a country in Africa. Further, the research looks at water governance and management aspects of this SDG.
The objective of this research is to assess the current structures around sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation in the focus country of Ghana, where there are outstanding issues in this area, in order to come up with which aspects of water governance to focus on and possibly recommendations to solve the discovered issues. In order to evaluate the water governance in Ghana, in this study, the water governance of the
Netherlands was used as a benchmark to answer the following research question: What are the strengths and weaknesses of Ghana’s water governance in terms of sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation when comparing to the industry best practice that is represented by the Dutch water governance?
I aim to assess the Ghanaian water governance and management practices, using the ten building blocks approach by van Rijswick et al (2014) as assessment framework, This approach provides the following building blocks of water governance to consider: (1) water system knowledge; (2) values, principles, policy discourses; (3) stakeholders involvement; (4) trade-offs between social objectives; (5) responsibility, authority, means; (6) regulations
and agreements; (7) financial arrangements; (8) engineering and monitoring; (9) enforcement and (10) conflict prevention and resolution.
By conducting a literature review the relevant assessment criteria is developed based on scientific literature and based on that, a methodology of assessment (Chapter 2 & 3). Next, it will provide an overview of the Dutch situation, looking at the Netherlands as a good governance benchmark (Chapter 4). After customizing the assessment framework to the issue at hand, and setting the benchmark against which to measure, further in-depth insight to the practical issues in relation to each of the building blocks in Ghana was attempted (Chapter 5). Further, after comparison of the available data of the two countries (Chapter 6) the following findings are made. First, that the major strengths of the Ghanaian system include the presence of democracy, of both government and market actors, the set-up of the design and implementation as well as the existence of the environmental monitoring system. Second, the major weakness is in the lack of available data. Recommendations are arrived at based on the findings as to how to improve water governance practices regarding sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation in Ghana (Chapter 7). These
recommendations include first and foremost that the availability of the water systems knowledge is needed to improve water governance in Ghana, together with transparent rules, and sufficient financial funding. | |
