The Catholic Relief Services (CRS) Ghana, a non-governmental organisation, has presented six motorbikes to the MampruguMoagduri District Assembly in the North East Region to facilitate the second phase of the Integrated Community Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Improvement (ICOWASH) project.
The motorbikes would be shared among decentralised departments in the Assembly, the Ghana Education Service (GES) and the Ghana Health Service (GHS)to support the monitoring and supervision of the project.
Dr Mohammed Ali, a Representative of the Country Director of the CRS, who presented the motorbikes, said the District Assembly, the GES and the GHS were strategic partners within the area to help the project achieve its mandate.
“As an organisation, we are very much interested in building the capacity of our partners in the areas of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene.
So in addition to the capacity building approach, we support these partners to ensure that the daily activities are well implemented to achieve the project objectives.”
He said the ICOWASH project was valued at about US$8 million, which covered activities in health care delivery, especially Water Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) in health care facilities and also the School Health Education Programme(SHEP) within schools.
Dr Ali said the CRS was happy that the project was well received by the Assembly, the Chiefs and people of the area, and called on them to effectively collaborate and commit themselves to the roles that they agreed to play to realise the strategic objective of the project.
The MampruguMoagduri District Chief Executive, Mr Abu Adam, who received the motorbikes, said the gesture was welcome news, as the area was deprived and officers needed such support to aid in their work.
The DCE noted that government alone could not shoulder the needs of the people in the District, “The support of NGOs and other philanthropists will help us achieve our aim, and that is exactly what CRS has done.”
Mr Adam appreciated the works of the CRS in the District and said the NGO had contributed significantly to the development of the area.
He said education was one of the areas the Assembly concentrated on, which was also a concern of the CRS, and that government would give NGOs the enabling environment to improve the lives of residents in the District.
Mr Peter Worlasi Adanu, the Project Officer of WASH in Health Care Facilities in the District said ICOWASH was a continuous project from the Integrated Sanitation, Hygiene and Nutrition Education (I-SHINE).
“We already had an I-SHINE project and the Rural Emergency Health Services and Transport (RESTI and II) project. Now we are complementing all these projects to make ICOWASH 2.0 in MampruguMoagduri District.”
According to the Project Officer, one of the major challenges faced in project implementation was the lack of resources and human capacity, adding that the motorbikes would assist officials in monitoring the project.
“Aside from all these, we are also doing capacity building training. We have started with the training of the Sanitation and Advocacy Groups (SAG) to support their communities in the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) implementation,” he said.
Source: GNA
