NICHE gets going in Ghana
18 Jun 2010
In Ghana, NICHE focuses on environment, health and natural resources management. One of the main challenges will be to improve the level of sanitation throughout the country.
Waste disposal awareness is generally high in Europe, with the pressure to recycle and reduce landfill. But in most of Africa, where the impacts of waste are growing rapidly as economic development brings plastic and other non biodegradable materials into the environment, awareness and action are still in their infancy.
Plastic garbage clogs drainage systems and mixed with domestic and human waste contaminates water sources, particularly during tropical rains. In cities, chemical and industrial effluent adds to the already overloaded drainage systems resulting in contamination of lakes and coastal waters.
In Europe, the introduction of domestic sanitation in the late 19th century increased average life expectancy by fifteen years. In most of Africa, from the sprawling informal housing of expanding cities to traditional rural settlements, no such sanitation facilities exist.
For NICHE, this is one the major challenges in Ghana: how to support better sanitation throughout the country. Acceptable sanitation, along with access to clean water, are both fundamental to the achievement of MDGs 4, 5, 6 and 7, whether directly or indirectly.
Environmental health
NICHE will be strengthening the education and training of those working in environmental health in Ghana, both in government as inspectors, advisers and regulators and increasingly those in the private sector contracted to manage waste.
Public education is a major component of improving sanitation. Communication and information skills are as fundamental to education and training in sanitation as technical knowledge.
Training health professionals
The second, related, area for NICHE is the training of health professionals in northern Ghana. The northern half of the country is the least economically developed part, with scattered rural populations and poor infrastructure.
There is a major brain drain of health professionals to the more economically attractive south, resulting in one medical doctor for over 100,000 persons in the north and unacceptably high levels of maternal and child mortality.
NICHE will be focusing on improving the education and training of nurses and midwives and, particularly, on improving the quality of clinical training, including doctors, in attachments across the small rural clinics and hospitals, with the expectation of greater retention.
Clinical training will be based on a foundation of problem-based learning in the classroom in place of current rote learning.
Natural resources management
The third theme for NICHE in Ghana is in the broad area of natural resources management. Ghana is losing its biodiversity at alarming rates. Hardwood timber extraction, both legal and illegal, is unsustainable and its wetlands are under threat.
The recent discovery of significant oil reserves brings the potential for further loss of coastal marine biodiversity.
NICHE will be working to encourage the results of environmental research to be better disseminated into the policy debate and be more accessible to decision makers.
We will also be supporting the Environmental Protection Agency in its external training programmes and encourage better enforcement of existing environmental protection legislation.
Low job absorbtion rate
Finally, we must also remember that in Ghana, like most of sub-Saharan Africa, economic growth, even in good times will never create enough jobs in the formal sector to absorb the growing young population, which puts enormous demands on the education system.
