The Upper West Regional Inter-agency Coordinating Committee on Sanitation (RICCS) says COVID-19 is adversely affecting the Open Defecation Free (ODF) campaign in the region. It said due to the outbreak of the pandemic in the country in March 2020, the committee could not facilitate the conversion of more open defecation communities to ODF as compared to previous years. In a presentation at the committee's meeting in Wa, the Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator at the Regional Environmental Health and Sanitation Department, Mr Agambire Alhassan Inusah, said in 2020, only 49 communities could attain ODF status. That represented 66 per cent of the communities that were submitted for verification within the period.