No abstract

Despite the essence of water supply and decent sanitation services to mankind, access to these basic services is a challenge in the Awutu-Senya East Municipality. The paper examined accessibility to water supply and sanitation services in the Awutu Senya East Municipality and the accompanying consequences. In the analysis of water provision responsibility, it was established that the contribution of private individuals constituted 64.2% of daily water production while public water provision effort constituted 35.8%. In spite of the enviable contributions of private individuals in water provision efforts in the Municipality, however, about 45% of the water sources are salty while 28% are impure and contaminated. Aside the inability of the Ghana Water Company Limited to supply desirable water quantities in the Municipality, the Assembly has also not been able to regulate the prices charged on water by private water operators, or make meaningful effort to augment water provision in the Municipality. Management of sanitation in the Municipality has proven to be daunting for authorities. The factors that lead to poor sanitation in the Municipality are diverse, ranging from weak institutional capacity to wrong attitudes. Consequently, the inefficiency of waste collection companies encourages indiscriminate disposal of wastes in the Municipality. For this reason, the Municipal Assembly should issue a minimum water quality requirement to all identified private water operators in order to ameliorate the quality problems associated water supply in the Municipality. Additionally, the Assembly should devise a better monitoring tool for ensuring that tasks assigned to waste collection companies in the Municipality are efficiently executed.

In Ghana, water resources represent a symbol of cultural authority, spiritual strength and a major source of wealth and power. To preserve these resources, taboos and customary practices were instituted as precepts in precolonial Ghanaian societies to regulate access. However, recent studies claim that the proliferation of Western religions has significantly diminished the potency of these centuries-long belief systems, with a potential impact on the role of beliefs on behaviours. Applying conditional process modelling to survey data from four rural communities in Ghana, we explore whether some beliefs influence pro-environmental behaviours in relation to water resources pollution; and examine the potential factors that moderate this link. Results show that some belief factors predict pro-environmental behaviour. However, this link depends on gender and age. The present study thus advances our understanding of the complex ways in which beliefs interact with sociodemographic variables to influence the adoption of pro-environmental behaviours.

Although housing is a fundamental human need, many lower income earning groups the world over continue to live in poor housing structures. Due to continuous urbanization in Ghana without a corresponding increase in decent or affordable rental housing, many urban dwellers are compelled to live in uncompleted housing units. Despite the increasing number of caretaker families residing in uncompleted houses in Ghana, there exists little or no well documented evidence of their plights. Consequently, this study was undertaken to assess the socio-economic conditions of families living in uncompleted houses as caretakers in the Awutu-Senya East Municipality of Ghana. The study revealed that about 56% of the sampled respondents earned between GH¢100 and GH¢200 as monthly incomes, while 27% earned between GH¢201 and GH¢400. It was realised that about 39 percent used torch lights for lightening, 31 percent used kerosene lamps and 8 percent used electricity. It was also observed that overcrowding was pervasive among respondents where about 85 percent with a family size of between three and four occupied just a single room while 15 percent with a family size of five or more dwelled in two rooms. In spite of the high overcrowding among respondents, 58 percent had lived in uncompleted houses for more than six (6) years while 42 percent had been occupying uncompleted houses between three and five years in the Municipality. To reduce the incidence of increasing habitation of uncompleted houses in the Municipality, a well-defined and comprehensive integrated system of housing finance should be instituted to enable low income earning households own decent but affordable housing, while pro-poor alternative strategies to mortgage financing arrangements are formulated.