Coronavirus: 78 percent of locked down districts did not benefit from govt free water - GSS

Latest report from the Ghana Statistical Service(GSS) shows that close to 78 percent of locked down and border localities were unable to benefit from government’s relief package on water.

As part of measures to mitigate the negative impacts of Coronavirus, the government absorbed water bills for all Ghanaians.

However, the free water intervention had a limited reach because most localities in the locked down areas relied on other alternative sources of water rather than Ghana Water Company, the GSS said.

“Close to 25 and 78 percent of localities did not benefit from the subsidies on electricity and water respectively because of the unavailability of these amenities. For electricity, this is because these localities were not connected to the national grid.

And for water, because localities relied on other alternative sources of water and were not served by the Ghana Water Company Limited,” GSS indicated.

The report stated that though most localities received assistance from the government, 41.5% and 40% of lockdown localities received support from churches and philanthropists respectively. Food was the largest assistance received.

GSS further said that despite various containment measures being put in place to stop the spread of the COVID-19, it is evident that the pandemic has had an adverse effect on businesses and the local economy.

The COVID-19 Local Economies Tracker Wave 1 was conducted with 2700 localities in the country from May to June 2020.

Out of the total number of localities surveyed 554 of them are in districts that were in lockdown areas.

1169 were in districts that share international borders with other countries (border districts) and 1047 were neither in lockdown nor border districts.