Ghana: Urban Sanitation Facility for the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area

Objective: The Urban Sanitation Facility for the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area sought to increase access to improved sanitation for low-income communities. The project was to partially subsidize the cost of access to new facilities and adequate services, incentivizing service providers to extend improved sanitation to low-income households. In addition, the project leveraged financial resources from micro-financing institutions and supports the scale up of business models that included soft loans for the provision of sanitation facilities in low-income communities.

Outputs: The facility overperformed by achieving 116 percent of its planned output, and the OBA approach was scaled up by the parent International Development Association (IDA) project and adopted by the African Development Bank for its activities in the country’s sanitation sector. The project installed 7,685 sanitation facilities in Accra’s lower-income communities and reached 47,190 beneficiaries.

Significant effort went into building the market for household sanitation, both on the supply and demand sides, before the project could build the toilets at scale within the agreed timeframe set at the design stage. The project’s first three years were largely focused on building the capacity of metropolitan and municipal assemblies and small and medium-sized enterprises, education of households, and engagement with the microfinance institutions. A combination of factors—competition among suppliers, increased scale, improvement in technologies, inflation, depreciation of the local currency, and fund reallocations inside the project—contributed to a larger number of sanitation facilities than projected.