Environmental sanitation unleashed: Effectiveness and challenges of the National Sanitation Day as a community sanitation participatory approach in Aboabo, Ghana

Investment in technical facilities by government alone is not enough to meeting the challenge of providing adequate sanitation services in communities. This study aimed at examining the effectiveness and challenges of the National Sanitation Day (NSD) as a community participatory module towards environmental sanitation in Aboabo, Ghana. Adopting a descriptive and inferential mixed method design, 10 key informants were interviewed using purposive sampling and 180 study participants using systematic sampling techniques. Result indicates an encouraging number of participation during the NSD. Statistically, higher educational attainment was a predictor of respondents’ participation in the exercise. Using respondents’ perception about the extent of environmental sanitation before the NSD exercise and their perception about the current environmental sanitation as benchmarks for assessing the programme’s effectiveness, the exercise was found to be ineffective. In recommendation, if needs be that prominent people are invited to intermittently grace the NSD exercise, their invitations should be to empower the local people to esteem the importance of the programme by making it their own rather than depending on their presence to increase patronage.