Mr Henry Asoma, the Deputy Director at the La Dade-Kotopon Municipal Assembly, has called on environmental officers to utilize waste-management capacity-building programmes to update their skills on new trends in the sector.
He said with the evolving challenges in the sector, it was pertinent that attention was paid to best practices being done to target to achieve a zero-waste situation in the Greater Accra Region.
Mr Asoma was speaking at a workshop organized by Green Africa Youth Organization (GAYO), in partnership with La Dade-Kotopon Municipal Assembly, SESA Recycling Limited, and the Small Grants Programme (SGP).
“As an assembly, our core mandate is to ensure the total development of the municipality, especially sanitation and general health. So, the training for the environmental officers is a way of equipping them with what they need to know while undertaking their duties to safeguard the people of the community.
“There are many programmes by the Accra Metropolitan Assembly to ensure a clean Accra and I think this fits into that objective, especially with the ‘Operation Clean Your Frontage' programme,” he said.
He said the training would also equip the environmental officers with knowledge of the legalities and by-laws of zero-waste to punish offenders who litter around the communities so as to reach the zero-waste target.
In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Madam Betty Owusu, the Project Coordinator at GAYO, said the training formed part of the Zero Waste Accra project and the Sustainable Plastic Management project, which seek to build the capacity of environmental officers to undertake their duties efficiently.
She said environmental officers do face challenges in undertaking their duties because of the need to refresh their minds on what was expected of them on the field.
“This programme is geared towards waste management and we are looking to build the capacity of communities to effectively collect waste. This can be achieved through our environmental health officers, who are mandated by law to undertake such duties.
“By doing so, we are targeting a zero-waste objective in our communities, especially limiting the waste that goes into our drains and preventing the flooding situation that has been a perennial challenge in the country,” she said.