Strengthening Water Quality Surveillance in Ghana

Safe Water Network Ghana has been selected as a nonprofit partner for the 2026 Merck, Sharpe & Dome (MSD), the multi-national pharmaceutical firm, Richard T. Clark (RTC) Fellowship for Global Health, a 12-week philanthropic leadership program that pairs small teams of cross-functional MSD employees with nonprofit partners to expand access to health.

Supported by MSD, a three-member fellowship team is working alongside our Ghana staff on the Enhancing Water Quality Surveillance and Health Risk Reduction Project. The work spans three complementary workstreams, each addressing a different layer of how we monitor and deliver safe water.

Building field team capability

MSD Fellows are training members of our Field Services team in water quality testing, standard operating procedures, quality assurance and quality control, and incident response. These are the people closest to the water stations, so strengthening their technical skills shortens the time between detecting a problem and resolving it.

Standing up the Kumasi laboratory

The second workstream supports our newly launched Mid-country Water Quality Testing Laboratory in Kumasi. The fellowship team is helping strengthen the lab’s operations through equipment, SOPs and operational guidelines, giving us regional testing capacity that is closer to the communities we serve.

Measuring health impact

The third workstream assesses the health impact of Safe Water Network water stations by comparing water-related disease outcomes in SWN-served communities against communities without a station. The findings will inform a technical report and a policy brief for dissemination to stakeholders, adding to the evidence base on what reliable safe water delivery achieves at the community level.

Why it matters

Taken together, the three workstreams reinforce one another. Better-trained field teams generate more reliable data. A functioning regional laboratory turns that data into verified results. And the impact study connects both to the health outcomes that ultimately justify the investment.

The result is stronger technical capacity, more rigorous water quality surveillance, and a clearer evidence base for the safe water services communities across Ghana depend on. We are grateful to MSD and to the fellows for the expertise they are bringing to this work through the MSD Richard T. Clark (RTC) Fellowship for Global Health.