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community water treatment

Driving Access and Equity in Water: Insights from the National Learning Alliance Platform

Posted on by chelseahodgkins

On April 24, 2025, Saha, the Ministry of Works, Housing and Water Resources, and Resource Centre Network convened senior policymakers, funders, implementers, and community representatives at the Coconut Grove Hotel in Accra for the National Level Learning Alliance Platform (NLLAP). The session—Driving Access and Equity in Water: Enabling Environment for Last-Mile Communities in Ghana—focused on forging sustainable, inclusive strategies to serve Ghana’s hardest-to-reach populations.

Context & Purpose
Safe drinking water is a recognized human right and essential to public health. Yet, according to the 2022 WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, over two million rural Ghanaians still lack reliable access. Urban and peri-urban improvements have outpaced rural gains due to low population density and high delivery costs. This NLLAP gathering aimed to identify innovative financing and policy measures to bridge the last-mile gap and ensure equitable water access for all communities.

Workshop Overview
Following opening remarks, the Water Directorate led an interactive workshop exploring practical funding and delivery mechanisms:

  • Last-Mile Water Fund: Pooling surplus financial-sector liquidity into a dedicated fund for remote water infrastructure.
  • Cross-Subsidization: Redirecting Community Water and Sanitation Agency revenues to support rural service delivery, backed by enabling legislation.
  • Sector-Wide Water Tax: Levying manufacturers and corporations that are heavy water users to finance last-mile initiatives.
  • Municipal Bonds: Structuring local bond issuances to underwrite rural water projects.
  • Performance-Based Allocations: Incentivizing District Assemblies via assessment tools to allocate common and MP constituency funds to underserved areas.
  • Service-Area Delineation: Defining clear operational zones to facilitate cost-recovery and subsidy models.
  • Livelihood Integration: Embedding income-generation activities to improve community ability to pay for incremental water tariffs.
  • Supplier Partnerships: Encouraging manufacturers of water system inputs to offer subsidized inputs, potentially via tax incentives.

Key Takeaways

  • Subsidies Are Essential: Participants agreed that targeted financial support is critical to last-mile viability.
    Legal and Institutional Frameworks: Effective financing mechanisms depend on supportive policies and structures currently under reform.
  • Continued Stakeholder Dialogue: While consensus exists on principles, detailed plans and systems must be developed to operationalize these ideas.

 Next Steps & Expectations

As a next step, the World Bank’s WASH Acceleration Project staff will engage with Saha Global to align on National Water Policy implementation while Saha continues to build a coalition around professional last-mile water service delivery. Advancing policy, data, and finance integration will require sustained, multi-year collaboration across stakeholders and we are excited by the momentum.

Theo Boateng, Director of Operations, Expansion and Partnerships, showcased Saha’s proven last-mile delivery methodology. Drawing on extensive field experience, he underscored how meticulous planning, community engagement, and financial innovation can deliver reliable, professionally managed water services to remote communities.

As Ghana strives to close its rural water gap, the insights and partnerships forged at NLLAP will guide national reforms, bringing us closer to the goal of safe, dependable water access for every community—no matter how remote.

 

Kofi Duku, Director of Water Quality and Service Delivery and other participants
Theo Boateng, Director of Operations, Expansion and Partnerships
A section of participants at the workshop
Blessing Gbandan Francis (white cap), Stakeholder and Government Relations Manager and other participants
Team Saha (L-R) Kofi, Lucy, Blessing and Theo

 

So, What IS the Best Way to Provide Safe Drinking Water?

Posted on by communitywatersolutions

As those of you who work in the water-treatment sector know, there are a variety of ways to address the need for clean drinking water in developing countries. Some examples include:

Household Water Treatment – using technology in your home to clean enough water for your family. Ceramic water filters, biosand water filters, cloth filters, SODIS, and boiling all fall into this category. California Lab Services is a certified environmental testing laboratory for soil and water meaning they are more than qualified to test for clean drinking water.

Community Water Treatment -treating enough water for an entire community at a centralized location (this is what CWS does in Ghana!)

Regional Water Treatment – building a large treatment facility that treats enough water for an entire region and then pipes it to the user’s homes or neighborhoods.

Improving Water Supply -borehole/well drilling, rainwater collection etc.

I am often asked what I think is the best way to treat contaminated drinking water in the developing world, and much to the dismay of the person asking this question, my answer is usually “it depends…”

Last Tuesday I was invited to speak to the Biology of Water and Health class at Tuft’s School of Public Health by my thesis adviser, Susan Murcott. Before my presentation, Georgia Kayser, a Phd Student at Tuft’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, presented her research on household water treatment vs. community water treatment in Honduras. Her presentation was not only very interesting, but also highlighted how the appropriate solution to this water problem really depends on the specific water needs in the region. In some regions, commercial water softeners may be needed to help with hard water issues that can affect the surroundings.

Georgia found that after 1 year there was about 50% sustained use when ceramic water filters (a household water treatment option) were provided to families, and only 30% sustained use when a community water treatment option was provided. What?! 30% sustained use for a community treatment option? Our monitoring in Ghana showed 60-75% sustained use of the CWS system (much higher use than research on the ceramic filter in Ghana had shown) . If you don’t know much about water filters, check out Water Filter Way.Why are our results so different?

I believe that the difference in sustained use statistics between CWS’s research and Georgia’s research is due to the major differences in the water supply between her communities in Honduras and the rural villages in nothern Ghana. Unlike the villages that we work in, where families must walk to the dugout (a contaminated surface water source) to fetch their water, each of the households that Georgia studied receive piped water in their homes. While this piped water is contaminated, and is often turbid, it is accessible in the home. In the CWS communities, our treatment centers are built right next to the dugout, where the women already walk multiple times each day to fetch water for cooking and washing. Now, in order to get clean drinking water, they just stop by the treatment center, instead of the dugout, during one of these trips. In Georgia’s villages in Honduras, however, women (or whoever is collecting the water) must change their behavior and make an trip to the treatment facility if they want clean water for drinking and carry a heavy container of water back to the home. A household bacteria water filter make much more sense in this situation since the water is piped right to the house.

There are many other differences between the CWS water treament techniques and the community water treatment technologies used in the villages that Georgia studied, but I thought this was a great example of how the appropriate treatment technique can vary greatly depending on the water situation in a specific region.