The Western Regional Coordinating Council (WRCC) is adopting innovative methods to address the pressing sanitation issues in the region.
Subsequently, an electronic application dubbed, ‘e-tankas’ has been developed and is being piloted in three districts to manage and report waste nuisances in the districts.
The three districts are Effia-Kwesimintsim Municipality (EKMA), Shama District and the Wassa East District Assembly (WEDA).
The e-tankas application was initiated under the leadership of the Regional Minister, Kwabena Okyere Darko-Mensah, to digitize the operations of the Environmental Health Departments in the fourteen MMDAs of the Region.
The idea was to transform the work of environmental health workers from the manual way of managing and reporting waste nuisance in society into the electronic platform.
This came to light during a short briefing on the e-tankas application to Management members of the Environmental Health Departments in each of the three Assemblies.
After the briefing, field officers undertook pilot exercises to appreciate how the system aligned with their traditional ways of administering their operations on the field.
In the pilot exercise, the team accosted several community members who were in the process of violating the rules already.
The field officers used the application to capture some of them and warned them to desist from those acts since the main implementation of the programme would not spare them when they were caught.
In the Shama districts, a young lady in her twenties was seen engaging in open defecation at Aboadze during the pilot exercise.
While at the Wassa East District, one of the communities was seen as very dirty with their waste dustbin site left unattended while the whole community left notoriously difficult.
The system was used to capture the offenders by one of the field officers and the offender was cautioned to desist from such acts since they would be prosecuted in the coming days when the system got to the final stage of implementation.
A household in Effiakuma No.9 in the EKMA was seen in a very untidy manner which the system would have facilitated their arrest and prosecution.
This mobile application, which is essential for public education and enforcement of sanitation bye-laws by community members and Environmental Health Officers, is the first of its kind in the Region.
The objective was to improve environmental sanitation service delivery in the region.
