By Olimatou Coker
The Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) unit on Tuesday and Wednesday held a 2days meeting with stakeholders at a meeting held at NaNa hall in Kanifing.
Speaking, Buba Manjang, Director of Public Health Service WASH, emphasized on the importance of this two day meeting, saying this will help them to ensure that they follow the standard set by WASH.
He said, this meeting will help them to ensure that they follow the standards set. Said they should make sure that they follow the WASH standards in place, and “also it will help us to ensure that we work according to our response plan as far as wash events are concerned equally.”
“It will also help us to ensure that the defense roles and responsibilities are in place. If we all know what we do, there will be no duplication of powers. We also want to ensure that there is communication amongst us to make us stronger for a good performance. On behalf of the ministry of health, we want to ensure that there is inclusiveness everybody must play a part.” He added
Haladou Mahaman, the UNICEF representative,who also doubles as the consultant of WASH said that this review will serve as a great opportunity for them to see what they have so far achieved and also to compare to see what is remaining for us to achieve for them to place in 2023.
“As other stakeholders are around it will help us to share lessons learned because we all know that there is no single WASH project in which we cannot have a cost of some battle necks.”
He said from this review of other partners and from implementing NGOs and partners in the field they can see what was the consent and bottleneck in the field so that this year it will help other people and implementing partners to be aware of this bottleneck and to overcome it.
Mahaman, also described the meeting as a great achievement already.
Program Manager for the project, Lamin Fadera, said the meeting marks a turning point with regards to proper coordination of water, sanitation, and hygiene in this country.
“ This has been the aim of all of us as if you look at the sanitation and hygiene policy 2019, 2020 for all of us to come together, put our heads together, work together to empower our communities with regard to information on water, sanitation and hygiene, and this cannot be done without proper coordination.”
He said , If there is no proper coordination, we will find ourselves in a situation where there will be duplication of efforts and then resources will not be in areas where they’re most needed. So bringing all of them together, will serve as an audit to all of us to see what we learn from what has passed.
Adding that this is the first of its kind for WASH to come together and review the year that they passed and also to put their heads together and prepare for the following year.
