By Erica Apeatua Addo
Damang (W/R), November 17, GNA – The Chief of Bosomtwe Divisional Area in the Prestea Huni-Valley Municipality, Nana Kwabena Amponsah IV, has urged the youth to take up farming as business and profitable venture.
He said the increasing demand for food at the local and international levels had made farming a lucrative business and tasked the youth to take advantage of the situation and venture into farming.
Nana Amponsah IV gave the advice at Damang when Abosso Goldfields Limited (AGL) held its fourth quarter community consultative committee meeting with their stakeholders.
“Farming could offer the youth better livelihood instead of sitting at home, complaining and not doing anything. This would help reduce youth unemployment in the mines host communities and the country at large”, the Divisional Chief of Bosomtwe added.
Nana Amponsah IV said the youth needed to replace the current crop of aged farmers and must not be discouraged by the many challenges in the agricultural sector.
Mr Abdel-Razak Yakubu, Community Affairs and Stakeholder Engagement (CASE) Manager, made a presentation on the update of Gold Fields Ghana Foundation projects and programmes for the mines catchment communities.
In the area of health, he said, “We have completed external works at Abosso Health centre and almost done with the construction of doctors and nurses’ quarters at Huni-Valley Health centre.
“We had discussions with the Municipal Health Directorate and they advised that when the Abosso Health centre project is completed and we should add some facilities to it, so that authorities could upgrade it to a Polyclinic status and that will improve on health care delivery in our host communities”.
He indicated that work on a 350-bed capacity female dormitory for Huni-Valley Senior High School would be completed this year to ease the accommodation crisis in the school.
“We had the opportunity to visit all the beneficiaries who have received our scholarship awards in their respective institutions. Going forward we are thinking of presenting bulk cheque to the schools rather than paying the fees individually. These are innovations that have come in to help make the work of our scholarship administration successful”.
On employment, Mr Yakubu said from January 2022 to date contractors of the Mine have employed 201 people from their host communities.
“We have even gone a step further with our transparency approach by inviting community members to sit in interviews and observe how things are going just to build more confidence into the process”.
The CASE Manager expressed gratitude to their stakeholders for the loyalty and support which has helped them to succeed.
GNA