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The Chief Executive of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), Mohammed Adjei Sowah has defended the Sanitation Minister’s claim of improved sanitation in the capital city.

The Minister for Sanitation and Water Resources, Cecilia Dapaah last week said Accra is generally clean, despite government’s inability to fulfil the promise of making Accra the cleanest city in Africa by 2020.

She made the statement in Parliament while answering a question posed to her on sanitation in the country.

In support of this, Mr. Adjei Sowah, on the Citi Breakfast Show on Wednesday, March 11, 2020, outlined some measures that have been put in place to ensure cleanliness in Accra.

“The Sanitation Minister was right when she said that despite the improvement in the sanitation, we are not there yet. And that is a fact. So to re-echo the position of the Minister, indeed we’ve made progress but we are not there yet. We have made progress in the sense that we are providing bins to people in terms of infrastructure that have come up in Accra to be able to collect waste. We have waste transfer stations in Accra. We have close to 1000 waste that are being recycled and turned into all kinds of things.”

“Plastic recycling is our big thing now. We are trying to get the right model for the collection of plastics and to recycle it. As a result of the economy of the metal waste that we have, you have a bunch of people that go round to collect metal waste. They process it and make money out of it. You can hardly find metal in our waste stream. It is the same model we are trying to apply on plastics. We are trying to get the right value for plastics and make an economy out of it,” he said.


Background
Cecelia Dapaah, in Parliament, also outlined various measures President Akufo-Addo has put in place to make Accra clean.

“There will always be challenges as the population grows and people migrate. Yes, there are challenges and I extensively brought to the Floor some of these challenges when I briefed the House. For instance, the honourable member was speaking about last week’s rain, the plastics are under the Ministry of Science, Environment, and Technology and the dredging is also under the ambit of the Ministry of Works and Housing.”

“The Ministry for the Works and Housing went around the city and visited the Aslyum down area and I know he is also giving contracts for drain dredging and I believe the Minister is capable of finding the needed solution but generally, I can say Accra is clean,” she said.
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