The Mayor of Accra, Michael Kpakpo Allotey, has urged traders to make cleanliness a daily habit rather than treating sanitation as a responsibility reserved for National Sanitation Day exercises.
He said maintaining clean trading spaces must become part of the everyday routine of traders, just as households routinely wash their plates after meals.
“When you finish eating, you wash your plate. In the same way, when you finish trading, you have to clean the place where you trade,” the Mayor said.
He made the call at Rawlings Park in Accra on Saturday, October 3, 2026, when the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) hosted the national flagship clean-up exercise to commemorate World Cleanup Day 2026.
The exercise was held under the global theme, “From Clean Plates to Clean Cities,” alongside Ghana’s national theme, “National Sanitation Day: Local Actions Yielding National Impact.”
According to the Mayor, the AMA’s sanitation efforts are not intended to stop people from doing business, but to create an environment where traders can work and earn their livelihoods without being exposed to preventable health risks.
He said traders should be able to make profits and take their earnings home rather than spend a significant portion of their income treating illnesses associated with poor sanitation.
Allotey said he had begun noticing some positive changes in the attitude of traders, including occasions when traders voluntarily swept and cleaned their surroundings during normal business hours.
He urged them to sustain that behaviour and make it part of their daily operations rather than waiting for organised clean-up exercises before clearing waste from their surroundings.
The Minister for Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs, Mahama Ayariga, used the occasion to announce planned measures to improve Ghana’s waste management system from the household level.
He said government was working towards providing households with separate waste bins, replacing open-bucket waste tricycles and establishing waste transfer stations across Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies.
According to Ayariga, all MMDAs have been given 30 days to identify and submit suitable one-acre sites for the construction of waste transfer stations as part of efforts to strengthen the waste management chain.
He said the government was developing an integrated system covering household waste collection, transfer, final disposal and recycling to address weaknesses across the sector.
Speaking on behalf of the Ga Mantse, King Tackie Teiko Tsuru II, Captain Nii Kojo Nseni Mankattah IV, Asafoatse Onukpa of the Ga State, also appealed to residents and traders to take greater responsibility for keeping public spaces clean after organised exercises.
He expressed concern that significant resources were often committed to sanitation exercises, only for some of the areas cleaned to become littered again within hours.
He therefore urged residents to discourage indiscriminate dumping and to challenge people who litter public spaces to pick up their waste and dispose of it properly.
The clean-up exercise brought together officials of the Ministry of Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs, the AMA, traditional authorities, market women, youth groups, sanitation workers and other stakeholders.
The organisers said the exercise was intended not only to clean public spaces but also to reinforce the need for a sustained culture of sanitation across communities.
