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 Upper West 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, Mr. Agambire Alhassan Inussah, the Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator at the Regional Environmental Health and Sanitation Department, said in 2020 only 49 communities could attain ODF status. That represented 66 percent of the communities that were submitted for verification within the period.