The CLTS Foundation team, led by Dr Kamal Kar, met with the Regional Minister of Volta Region, Honorable Ms Helen Adjoa Ntoso and The Deputy Minister, Honorable Francis Komla Ganyaglo to trigger the regional leadership to intensify efforts to scale up CLTS in the Volta region. CLTS was first implemented in the Volta region in the year 2012 and over the last three years, the region has made significant progress in a few districts. During the meeting, the team drew attention to the good work done by a few district administration teams in leading CLTS initiatives in the region and urged the regional leadership to put in place a plan to scale up CLTS implementation and coverage in the remaining districts as well. They highlighted the need for dynamic leadership at the regional and district level to drive CLTS with quality in the region. Out of 25 districts in the region, The implementation of CLTS in 7 of the districts have shown good results, while the others have lagged behind. At present the region has 476 communities that have declared themselves as ODF. Out of this, 36 of them have been officially certified while the remaining will be certfied in due course of time. In a remarkable achievement, that highlights the effectiveness of CLTS, the country teams have reported the absence of any cholera cases in all of these 476 communities that have achieved ODF in comparison to other non-ODF communities where​ 680 cases of cholera with 8 deaths were reported in the year 2014.

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Committing to invest adequate resources into all the districts, the Deputy Minister said ” We are committed to making Volta region the first ODF region in Ghana and we will do this by December 2016″. In an institutional triggering workshop facilitated by the CLTS Foundation team along with key officials from the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, the Deputy Minister actively led discussions with his district teams on
strategies to make Volta region ODF. He said that the region had made good progress but that they had to pick up speed and achieve more quickly. He said that the regional leadership was fully committed to supporting the district heads and their teams to put in place a region-wide strategy and roadmap to intensify CLTS efforts in the region. He put forth very innovative and practical solutions towards scaling up CLTS across the region. He asked the districts that had achieved some degree of success in producing ODF communities to mentor and share its trained human resources, including natural leaders,​with its neighbouring district teams in order to help them progress as well.He highlighted the importance of sharing experiences learning from each other in order to build a robust knowledge system that will enable faster progress. The Regional Minister reinforced her commitment to making Volta region the first ODF region in Ghana. She said that the regional leadership would work with each of the 25 districts to ensure that each district has a roadmap and action plan to steer efforts and resources ​in a focused manner ​towards achieving ODF districts by the end of next year.