According to the Minister, this was one surest way the people could complement the ruling government efforts at ensuring that over 85% of Ghanaians both in urban and rural communities had easy access to potable drinking water to ward off the incidence of Guinea Worm and also to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.
Speaking at a day’s stakeholders’ forum on water and sanitation in Tamale recently, the Northern Regional Minister accentuated that construction of boreholes and dams had not been any beneficial to the people of the region, since about 70 to 80% of those boreholes had refused to yield any water and the few yielding ones were contaminated with high fluoride.
“The Northern Region generally has a very low success rate when it comes to ground water exploitation. The average figure is 50% and sometimes as low as 10% and thus has huge investment cost implications. To further compound the issue, we are challenged with the incidence of high Fluoride in ground water. There is therefore the need to adopt alternative means or technologies that would take due cognizance of these challenges and address them in order to give value for money,” Mr. Mabengba explained.
He expressed worry that about 58% of the rural and peri-urban settlements in the entire region currently had access to safe water and therefore impressed on the people to try hard to adopt the rainwater harvesting strategy to enable them store rainwater for use during the dry seasons so as to avoid the dependence on unhygienic sources of water, which usually brings about some water borne diseases.
Meanwhile, until recently, the Northern Region alone accounted for over 96% of the total number of Guinea Worm cases recorded in the 10 regions of Ghana with Central Gonja, Savelugu-Nanton Districts and the Tamale Metropolis leading the rest of the districts in the country.
This according to health experts was as a result of non-availability of safe drinking water. At the moment, it is only the Tamale Metropolis and the Yendi Municipality that are supplied with treated water by the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) out of the 20 districts in the whole of the Northern Region.
However, majority of the deprived communities that are depending on open Dams are faced with serious challenges as they share the water with cattle of alien Fulanis and other livestock animals.
Some of the Dams are also polluted by human excreta, agro chemicals and other waste materials especially during raining seasons.
The Northern Regional Minister on the other hand, commended the National Democratic Congress government for sourcing 89.1 million dollars for the expansion of the Tamale Water System and additional 77.34 million pounds for the construction of 20,000 boreholes in 54 districts across Ghana which 14 out of the 20 districts of the Northern Region would benefit.
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