Water is a precious commodity in human daily life.
Water is precious because without it, human beings cannot live.
According to the World Water Day website, 2.1 billion people in the world today live without safe drinking water at home, affecting their health, education and livelihoods.
Sustainable Development Goal 6 enjoins the world to ensure that everyone has access to safe water by 2030, and includes targets on protecting the natural environment and reducing pollution.
Ghana has four major sources of water where it derives it to feed the people; the sea, rivers, lagoons and man-made dams.
The country has two major weather patterns which are the dry and the rainy seasons.
The rainy season contributes significantly to enriching the water resources the people rely on for survival.
The northern region of Ghana has four rivers going across it and these are the white and black Volta rivers, river Oti, and river Dakar.
The region is gradually coming out of a usual intensive dry season where the savannah goes completely dry, farmers go on break for lack of water for farming and humans generally find it difficult to access water for use in the household and for other activities.
In the rural areas, in some cases, human beings and animals share the same water sources.
The theme for World Water Day 2018 is “Nature for Water – exploring nature – based solutions to the water challenges we face in the 21st century”.
This theme ties into finding real time solutions for many of the challenges communities face accessing potable water in northern Ghana.
To this end, WUZDA Ghana set out about 10 years ago to help communities own water facilities they can rely on for clean water for drinking and other household activities.
The organization has so far constructed water storage facilities for communities including Nyeshee, Cheko, Wovogu primary and Bimbila primary schools, Taha, Gbalahi and Kulaa all in the northern region of Ghana.
WUZDA also organizes periodic trainings for community members on how to use local ways in managing and preserving water for alternative use.
As part of WUZDA Ghana’s pilot project funded by ‘Bread for The World’ in Germany, waste water from the household is being treated using local techniques, which is then passed through a system of drip irrigation for vegetable farmers’ use.
This is to ensure that the use of fresh water by farmers is reduced to help in water preservation and used for other activities at the household and other community levels.
As Ghana joins the rest of the world to commemorate World Water Day, 2018, WUZDA Ghana would like to congratulate all stakeholders in the water sector and urge duty bearers to ensure the access to safe water is actualized especially at the community level to cut down the rates of water related diseases that make governments spend the meager resources in curing the people.
WUZDA Ghana would also like to implore community members to cultivate the habit of water preservation to ensure that when the dry season kicks in, there may be clean water for use.
Happy World Water Day, Save the nature for clean water!!!
Signed
Shaibu Awudu
(Communications Specialist – WUZDA Ghana)
WUZDA Ghana 