By Philip Tengzu
Nanga, (UW/R), Sept. 04, GNA-Some vulnerable people at Nanga, a community near Charikpong in the Nadowli-Kaleo District, have appealed to the district Social Welfare Department to consider extending the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty Programme (LEAP) intervention to the Nanga community.
They claimed that since the inception of the LEAP, no individual in that community had benefited from it though there were many vulnerable people there who were qualified for the support.
“We hear the government is supporting the vulnerable people in some places in this district, but we have been left out and I don’t know whether we are not Ghanaians.
It seems no one cares about us in this community”, Isung Langsung, an aged person in the community, said.
The people, who included Persons with Disabilities and the aged, shared their concerns with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) during a visit to the community.
According to them, they had attended several meetings at the community, and even at the district capital, Nadowli and people wrote their names and took their photographs with the promise of coming to support them but to no avail.
Mr Langsung said, “It is about three years now since we went to a meeting in Nadowli and they took our pictures but to date, we have not heard from them again.”
Madam Helen Kuntiin, also a vulnerable person at the community said, “We the aged and disabled people in this community are dying of hunger. Someone can get up in the morning, even porridge he or she will not get to drink.”
“We are pleading with the government to help us to also benefit from the LEAP”, she added.
The vulnerable people in the community, therefore, appealed to the government through the Nadowli-Kaleo District Assembly to “have mercy on us” and to include them in the LEAP programme because “we are really suffering here.”
Meanwhile, Madam Tamarimata Ibrahim Sally, the Nadowli-Kaleo District Director of the Social Welfare Department, told the GNA that the people at the Nanga community refused to be registered with the LEAP when officers from the department visited that community to register them.
“Our officers wasted fuel to go to that community and they said they are not poor people, even when we went there to register Persons with disabilities they refused to come out, meanwhile they are there.
When they saw that other people in other communities were benefiting, they now traveled to the office to register, but by that time too the registration was over”, she explained.
Madam Ibrahim, however, gave the assurance that the vulnerable people at the Nanga community would be registered to benefit from the LEAP when the office paves way for registration.
GNA