CHANGE ATTITUDE TOWARDS ENVIRONMENT (PAGE 21)

Ghanaians have been urged to change their attitude towards the environment and sanitation to ensure good health and reduce frequent visits to health centres.
The second-placed winner of the just ended Ghana’s Most Beautiful Pageant, Ms Eyram Dotsey, the Sanitation Ambassador, who made the call in Takoradi on her 10-regional tours, said if people adopted positive attitude towards sanitation, the various district, metropolitan and municipal assemblies and the central government would not have spent so much money on waste management.
She said since there was a limit to the efforts of authorities, the biggest challenge rested on the people and how they perceived issues of sanitation within their localities.
“When you travel outside Ghana, the streets of developed countries are neat, there is no magic to it. It is just simple; the attitude of the people towards sanitation by making use of waste bins. We might not be rich like the UK, America and Malaysia but if we the citizens play our roles well, we will be better than this,” he said.
Ms Dotsey said she made a promise to herself that if she should emerge the winner of the pageant, she was going to tackle sanitation and help create the awareness.
The beauty queen said to ensure effective dissemination of information, she and her team had developed various modes of communication to ensure that the message got to the targeted groups.
She said the team mounted photo exhibition to support her campaign in the entire 10 regions they visited with the support of UNICEF and the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Environment.
Ms Dotsey said even though she did not emerge the winner, she thought placing second was a remarkable achievement to abandon her dream.
She said from what she saw in the various regions, she realised that everybody was aware of the issue of sanitation and how hazardous it could be to the health of the people, “therefore the problem is no longer with the authorities, but rather the people, and if we all change our attitudes and create clean and healthy environment at the individual level, things will be better for us”.
Ms Dotsey said people were aware that gutters were for liquid waste, therefore, “if we citizens dump solid waste into gutters and find it difficult to move to the communal containers to dump our solid wastes, then we are doing more harm than good”.
Her visit took her to the Takoradi central market to educate the traders on the importance of clean environment in attracting customers to their stands and also to the various radio stations, as well as other communities also in the metropolis.
Ms Dotsey commended the market women for ensuring that gutters that ran through the market were kept clean, saying, “I am impressed that the gutters in the market were not choked with filth but liquid was running freely through them.”
“My next project is to source funding to support some of the communities that need urgent attention. I am grateful to UNICEF, the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Environment and the various offices of the Environmental Services Department for their support,” she said.