Kendeu, (UW/R), Dec. 20, GNA – Residents of Kendeu, a community in the Wa West District, can now heave a sigh of relief over their daily ordeal with potable water supply, especially during the dry season.
Access to potable water for domestic and economic use for the community’s 2000 inhabitants had been a big challenge until the Amazing Grace Children’s Foundation (AGCF), a not-for-profit organisation based in the USA with an office in Ghana, intervened.
The organisation provided the community with a mechanised borehole under its Water for Improved Sanitation and Health (WISH) project with funding from individual donors in the United States.
The project, facilitated by the AGCF, costs a little over US$4000.00 and also have plans to provide a permanent solution to the water need of the Kendeu community.
Speaking to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at the commissioning of the facility, Mr Clifford Yaw Frimpong, the Director in charge of the WISH project, noted that the facility was to help meet the water, sanitation and hygiene needs of the people, especially in an era of the COVID-19 global health crisis.
“It is my conviction that the facility will be of great help to the people, especially school children who have to queue long hours and sometimes return home without water. Now reporting late to school would hopefully be a thing of the past just as their struggle with certain preventable diseases.
“It will also save parents from wasting productive hours searching for water instead of focusing on their economic activities,” he explained.
Mr Frimpong said the organisation chose to construct the facility in the dry season since “around this time of the year, water needs become unbearably critical for humans and livestock in deprived communities, thereby compounding other social challenges.”
“Around these times, wells, ponds and most water sources get dried up, and this is when we see humans competing with their livestock for survival,” he added.
Mr Frimpong urged well-meaning Ghanaians to contribute their “widow’s mite” to support community development, particularly to the water needs of the deprived communities, as a way of compensating them for their lack of access to other social amenities such as electricity and decent health facilities, among others.
“We should not always blame politicians. Sometimes we have to be agents of change in our communities and get things done,” he added.
The AGCF, in August this year, constructed a mechanised borehole for the Zanko Paani community in the Wa West District after a GNA report exposed the challenges the people went through accessing potable water in the community.
Mr Frimpong said the next project would be in support of the Pialoko community in the Pusiga District of the Upper East Region.
Meanwhile, Mr Jerry Olo, the Assembly Member of the Kendeu Electoral Area, noted that the water situation faced by Kendeu was very dire as over 2,000 residents of the community hitherto depended on unsustainable means of water supply, making it very difficult for them.
He explained that women and children sometimes scrambled for water at the three boreholes in the community and commended the AGCF for the intervention, which, he said, would help alleviate their plight.
“I will meet with the community for us to put in measures and systems to manage the facility well because we are the ones to benefit from it”, Mr Olo said.
He also appealed to the general public to come to their aid as some communities in the electoral area depended on either a single borehole or untreated sources for water.
He said the Kao and Gborteng communities are the worst in need.
GNA