Millennium Village Project Launched

Story: Musah Yahaya Jafaru & Benjamin Xornam Glover, Silinga President John Mahama has launched the Millennium Village Project (MVP) in the West Mamprusi District in the Northern Region and the Builsa District in the Upper East Region. The project seeks to reduce poverty and improve the living standards of the people in the three regions of the north. Among some of the projects to be implemented are construction of clinics, provision of free bed nets, agricultural subsidies, potable water, schools, electricity, roads and further support for the communities in sustainable development. The project seeks to help the beneficiary communities to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and it is being jointly implemented by the British Department for International Development (DFID) and the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority( SADA). The project, which would be completed in five years, is expected to cost £11.5 million and benefit 30,000 people in the catchment area. It is being funded by the British Department for International Development (DFID). Launching the project at Silinga in the West Mamprusi District in the Northern Region Tuesday, President Mahama said the project would improve the living standards of the people in the savannah ecological zone. “The project is going to change lifes in all aspects, ” he said, adding that when the project succeeded it would be replicated in all rural areas in the three regions of the north and the northern parts of the Volta and Brong Ahafo regions. He said the aim of the project was to create opportunities in the rural areas to reverse the situation where people migrated from the northern parts of the country to the southern parts in such of jobs. He called for a collective ownership of the SADA interventions if the programme was to achieve the objectives for which it was set up. “It is wrong for people to sit on the fence and ask what the SADA has done for the people of the region.“We must bear in mind that the SADA is a 20-year programme and not an event. The SADA belongs to the people living in the Savannah Ecological Zone and until we rise up and own it, we will not achieve success,” the President said. President Mahama said all credit for the successful launch of the project must go to late President John Evans Fiifi Atta Mills, under whose tenure the project was formulated. He said under the better Ghana Agenda of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government, the late President provided for a vehicle that would bridge the development gap between the north and the south. He thanked the UK Government for the work it did in getting the SADA off the drawing board to the implementation stage through the DFID, which he described as very active in the fields of education, health, private sector development and in governance. “It is our determination, under this government, to expand cooperation and partnership,” he stressed. At the launch were Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute and Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and Mr Andrew Mitchell, UK’s Secretary of State for International Development. Professor Jeffrey Sachs expressed the hope that the launch of the programme would mark the beginning of the end of poverty in the West Mamprusi and Builsa districts because there was no reason for poverty to continue. “This is a hardworking community, and with the helping hand from the United Kingdom, coupled with new technologies and new ways of doing things, poverty can be ended in this region. That is our determination, ” he said. For his part, Mr Andrew Mitchell, the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development, said by the end of the project cycle, the UK would want to see at least 11,000 people lifted out of poverty, with another 15,500 people having access to sanitation. He added that they looked forward to seeing 10,000 people having access to clean water and a massive drop in the number of children under five who died so early in their lives. The President of the National House of Chiefs and Paramount Chief of the Wulugu Traditional Area, Naa Professor John Nabila, on behalf of the overload of the Mamprugu Traditional Area, expressed the appreciation of the chiefs and people of the area to the UK Government for extending support to the area. He expressed the hope that the intervention would witness a tremendous transformation in agriculture, health, education, infrastructure and Information Communication Technology that would transform the lives of the people and project the area into a middle income status.