The Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) has revealed that Ghana is facing a shortage of environmental health officers despite thousands of trained professionals remaining unemployed due to the lack of financial clearance from government.
The Assembly’s Public Health Director, Florence Kuukyi, disclosed this in an interview on Dwaso Nsem on Adom FM while discussing the challenges confronting environmental health services in the country.
According to Mrs Kuukyi, Ghana currently has just over 4,000 environmental health officers, a number she said is inadequate considering the scale of sanitation and public health responsibilities nationwide.
“We are a little over 4,000,” she said, highlighting the limited workforce available to enforce sanitation regulations and public health standards.
She explained that Ghana has three Schools of Hygiene responsible for training environmental health professionals, yet many graduates remain unemployed after completing their programmes.
“There are three Schools of Hygiene. Since 2022 to 2025, students who have completed these schools are unemployed because they have not received financial clearance,” she stated.
Mrs Kuukyi noted that the delay in recruitment is particularly worrying because a significant number of experienced officers have retired or moved to other jobs over the same period.
“But within this period, a lot of people have retired, and many have changed jobs,” she added.
The AMA Public Health Director also pointed out that environmental health work is not financially attractive, making it difficult to retain officers without strong commitment to the profession.
“This job doesn’t pay. It takes passion and courage to do it,” she emphasised.
Mrs Kuukyi warned that the shortage of environmental health officers could undermine sanitation enforcement and public health campaigns if the situation is not addressed.
She therefore called on government to urgently grant financial clearance for trained graduates so they can be absorbed into the public health system to strengthen sanitation monitoring and environmental health services across the country.
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