Wa East District Assembly is to spend more on development projects

Funsi (U/W), Aug. 14, GNA - Members of the Wa East District Assembly have approved 1,321,094.84 Ghana cedis for development projects this year. The money would be used to provide school infrastructure, health facilities, potable water, police stations, residential and office accommodation as well as the acquisition of a grader to improve feeder road network in the district. The amount had been raised from the District Common Fund, the Community Based Rural Development Programme and the District Wide Assisted Programme.

Addressing the first ordinary session of the assembly Mr. Ameen Salifu, the District Chief Executive, said the Wa East District Assembly appeared to have been the only one in the region that had not yet submitted its District Assembly Common Fund Supplementary Budget to the District Assembly Common Fund Secretariat for the release of its share of the fund.

He urged the assembly members to be united and work hard to enable the district to catch up with the other districts in the region with development.

"Wa East District is said to be the last district in almost everything and we must work hard to overcome this negative tag", Mr. Salifu said.

Mr. Salifu said revenue mobilisation in the district had been poor and called on the assembly members to redouble their efforts to help generate more revenue to support development activities. He said six communities that were to be provided with boreholes last year had not benefited even though some monies had been paid to the contractor as mobilisation fee to carry out the projects. He urged the assembly to call the contractor back to site to provide the boreholes or take immediate steps to re-award the contract. Mad Dominica Dassah, Wa East District Director of Education, said there was no Senior High School, Technical and Vocational institution or Teacher Training College in the district.

She said poor staffing of teachers in schools and in the district offices as well as lack of office and residential accommodation were also impacting negatively on quality education delivery in the area. On the education reforms Madam Dassah said only one syllabus had been printed out for teachers instead of providing them with syllabi for every subject that they taught at school. She called for the printing of more syllabi for teachers to effectively handle lessons for the children.

Madam Dassah said many school children from the district were migrating to illegal mining sites, especially Tinga in the Northern Region, for economic gains instead of staying in school. She appealed to parents to take more interest in their children's education to help push the development of the district forward and to reduce poverty. 14 Aug 09