Egyapa Mercer details how he spent his social investment fund on Sekondi market roofing

One of the major problems of the traders of Sekondi market is the roofing of the market.

The bad roofing, they said affected their businesses, especially on rainy days.

Following the identification of this problem which hinders the growth of the businesses of these market women, the Deputy Minister for Energy, Andrew Egyapa Mercer, has come to their aid.

According to the lawmaker, he used his social investment fund to fix the roofing of the market after his attention was drawn to it.

Speaking on Connect FM’s Omanbapa morning show, Andrew Egyapa Mercer said, “The traders will attest to the fact that the roofing was bad in the past and I used my resources to fix it when the NDC PC was nowhere to be found.”

“When it came to my attention again that the roofing was in a bad state, I spoke to the MCE and he promised to mobilize resources to fix it since they take tolls from the traders but it turned out they do not have the resources to fix it. So I had to use my social investment fund to fix the roofing,” he stated.

Information available on the Social Investment Fund website sighted by GhanaWeb indicates that the fund was set up in 1998 under the Companies Code 1963 (ACT 179) by the Government of Ghana (GoG), African Development Bank (AfDB) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The fund was set up as a rapid, reliable and flexible mechanism for channelling resources to deliver targeted assistance to Ghana’s urban and rural impoverished communities.

Meanwhile, the deputy energy minister noted that the reconstruction of the Sekondi market was in the pipeline.

“Item number 33 on the approved list of Public Investment Projects in 2022 to 2024 for the medium term captures the Sekondi Market. So the expectation was that the Sekondi market would be re-constructed within the period making it difficult for the metro Assembly not to spend any money on it," he said.

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