Meeting in Ghana 2021

After numerous online meetings, the first meeting of the partners could now take place in person. To introduce the project and build synergies with various stakeholders in Ghana, a 5-member team comprising two people from Ethiopia and three from Germany joined their partners in Ghana from the 1st to the 15th December 2021. The team met among other stakeholders, workers in the waste sector (management, waste sites, collection, transportation, etc.), Workers in the environment sector, academics and students.

You can find the presentations of the SDG indicator workshop and some pictures of the stay in Ghana below this text.

The team was welcomed by the Geography and Resource Development Department of the University of Ghana, given a brief description of the department and shown around the key areas.

On the first day, the team had a meeting with WSCAL. Both the SuCCESS 24 team and the WASCAL team gave presentations about their ongoing projects. It turned out that WASCAL was implementing some similar projects as SuCCESS 24, for example on climate change and several composting and renewable energy plants in different parts of the country. Especially in the areas of student scholarships, student exchanges, summer or winter schools, research and capacity building trainings, synergies with SuCCESS 24 can arise and a lot can be learned from each other.

On the following days, meetings with the Environmental Service Providers Association (ESPA) and the GIZ E-waste programme team were scheduled. The respective activities were presented and synergies were discussed. 
The DAAD was visited and it was discussed how the DAAD can support the organisation of stays of Ghanaian students in Germany.

The team was also given a tour of two Kpone Landfills, one active and one decommissioned landfill, to get an insight into the operation. They also visited Mortuary Road scrapyard, the major surviving scrapyard in Agbogbloshie and held a meeting with the leadership as well as the Pilot Incentive System facility at the erstwhile Old Fadama scrapyard where e-waste including batteries, cables and wires are purchased from informal scrap workers to prevent copper burning and other unsafe recovery methods used by the informal scrap workers.
Further more, final preparations had to be made for the SDG Indicator Workshop on 09.12.2021.

After the workshop on thursday there was a post workshop meeting where the results were discussed by the SuCCESS 24 team as well as the next steps for the development of an SDG-based indicator set for Ghana.
ZoomLion the environmental sanitation management group invited the SuCCESS 24 team to a tour through its waste recycling facilities. Sewerage Systems and Lavender wastewater treatment plant, Integrated Recycling and Compost Plant with mechanical-biological treatment, and the Accra Compost & Recycling Plant.
The last days were filled with meetings on content development and both winter and summer school frameworks, open questions and the definition of next steps.

The main objective of the workshop was to identify sustainability topics derived from the SDGs with a high relevance for different stakeholder groups in the context of municipal solid waste management in the Accra Greater Area that could be prioritised for implementation.

For the identification of relevant sustainability topics, the participants were split into 4 major clusters, that were sub-divided into three stakeholder groups – Informal waste sector and NGOs, Formal waste sector and municipality, and the Academia and science. Thus, there were 12 stakeholder sub-groups in total. Each stakeholder sub-group was tasked to rank the SDG-based sustainability topics in relation to their scope of action and significance of impact of their respective stakeholder group. However, with the exception of Group one where the three stakeholder sub-groups independently ranked the topics, other groups such as in Group two, worked together in ranking the topics on behalf of each sub-group. After the first rankings, the participants were regrouped into the three main stakeholder groups and tasked to rank their top five priority sustainability topics.

A juxtaposition of the two rankings shows that none of the sustainability topics enjoy the popular support of all three stakeholder groups simultaneously. For example, although education and skills development was ranked among the top-5 by all three stakeholders in the second round, it did not feature in any of the four informal sector sub-groups during the first rankings. This suggests that its top ranking among informal sectors in the second round may have been influenced by an external stakeholder input.

Overall, the following sustainability topics could be considered priority:

1. Effective, accountable and inclusive institutions
2. Health and safety
3. Education and skill development
4. Poverty
5. (Abioic resource depletion)
6. (Hunger)
7. Infrastructure
8. Access to electricity
9. Energy supply and efficiency
10. Climate change
11. Egalitarian society
12. Industrialisation
13. (Economic growth, employment and decent work)
14. (Access to imporved drinking water sources)
15. Access to improved sanitation facilities

The trip to Ghana and the initial stakeholder consultation including the workshop was very fruitful. Although the team was unable to meet the AMA physically, this can be done virtually. Relying largely on the first ranking (due to its broad stakeholder representativeness) and with the help of the second ranking 15 sustainability topics have been identified for project attention. The list can be trimmed further as the project team deem necessary.

We would like to thank all participants for their commitment, great insights and productive cooperation.