Newmont Ghana approves over $2 million for employee, community and health initiatives

Newmont Ghana has approved over $2 million (GH¢11million) to be spent on employee, community and national health initiatives and local economic resilience initiatives within and beyond host communities, Francois Hardy, the Regional Senior Vice President, Africa Operations, has announced.

He said among the beneficiary institutions are the Noguchi Memorial and Kumasi Collaborative Centre Research Institutes, Birim North Health Service, Birim North District Assembly, Birim Central District Assembly, Asutifi North District Assembly Asutifi North Health Service, Asutifi North District Police Service, Tano North Municipal Assembly and the Tano North Health Service.

When Ghana recorded its first case in March, he said, Newmont Ghana announced an initial $100,000 package to support the country’s fight against COVID-19.

This was targeted at assisting the two national testing centres in Accra and Kumasi to purchase testing kits as well as health centers in our host communities to help their COVID-19 management plans.

Additionally, we contributed over $520,000 towards the Ghana Chamber of Mines’ $2 million donation to Ghana’s COVID-19 Trust Fund. We continue to hold public sensitization programmes on our community radio stations to educate local communities on preventive measures against the spread of the virus.

Just last week, Newmont Ghana signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine (KCCR) to support the nation’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the MoU, we will procure PCR equipment, ancillary equipment, reagents and other consumables to augment the capacity of KCCR to scale up its testing.

Also, KCCR will help set up PCR machines and other ancillary equipment at two laboratories in our Ahafo and Akyem host communities to build their testing capacity for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. The total value of procuring the PCR machines, ancillary equipment, reagents and setting up of the laboratories is GHc 3.1million ($545,000).

The MoU is part of the company’s initiatives sponsored from its Africa Region’s allocation of Newmont Corporation’s Global Community Support Fund set up to support COVID-19 management efforts in its operating jurisdictions.