ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: Rural communities in Ghana are defined as those with less than 5000 inhabitants. Rural people make up 56.6% of Ghana’s total population of 18.9 million. Most of these rural communities have traditionally relied on a wide variety of water sources for their water supply: dug-wells, ponds, dug-outs, dam impoundments, streams, rivers and rainwater harvesting. Many of these sources, particularly those based on surface water resources, are contaminated and a major contributor to the disease and poverty endemic in many rural communities. Presently only about 52% of the rural inhabitants have access to improved safe water supplies – which are mainly derived from groundwater sources. In Ghana, developing groundwater is seen as the most economic way of providing safe water supplies to the dispersed rural settlements. To improve the standard of living and boost economic activities in the rural areas, the government has drawn up a policy of supplying most of the rural communities with potable water. This is in line with the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of reducing by half the population of the world without access to potable water by the year 2015. The government of Ghana has set itself a more ambitions task of covering about 85% of the rural communities with potable water by 2015.
1 INTRODUCTION
