News:
May 20, 2014
A 21-member Parliamentary Select Committee on Health, led by Joseph Yieleh Chireh, Member of Parliament for Wa West, has paid a day’s working visit to the Bonsaaso Millennium Village project in the Amansie West District to assess the progress of work since its inception eight years ago.
The project team leader, Mr. Samuel Danquah, briefed members of the Committee on Telemedicine, by which clinics in the cluster easily communicate with a Medical Doctor at the Saint Martin Catholic Hospital at Agroyesum, to give first aid treatment to patients at the cluster.
Welcoming the Parliamentary Committee, Mr. Samuel Danquah said during a durbar of chiefs and people of Bonsaaso that the MVP is an integrated rural development programme, designed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 in low income rural communities in Africa. He said the MVP operates in more than a dozen countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including major clusters of villages in 10 countries.
The Millennium Villages strategy is based on simultaneous, integrated investments in five key sectors – Agriculture and Environment, Health, Education, Infrastructure, Institutional Development, and Business Development -in order to raise household incomes, reduce disease burden, and cut food insecurity and chronic hunger. He said the Bonsaaso Millennium Villages project site was launched in Ghana in January 2006, and named after the Bonsaaso community, located in the Amansie West District.
The cluster encompasses 30 contiguous rural communities in and around Bonsaaso, with a total population of 30,000 people, covering three out of 13 area councils, and including about 22% of the district’s population . He said before the project began, the area had seen poverty in all of its forms, low food crop productivity, poor infrastructure, poor health and education, etc., the health system was not functioning adequately.
The population of 30,000 had no medical doctor, only two midwives, one community health nurse and one health assistant.
He said not a single community in the cluster had access to electricity, even though the electricity grid was 5 kilometres away, and that safe drinking water, sanitation, the road network between communities, and information and communication technology coverage were all insufficient.
The team manager said the education system had declined, and that the government of Ghana is providing implementation and resource support to the Bonsaaso MVP. At Manso-Datano, the team inspected a clinic and CHEW Programme.
The District Chief Executive for Amansie West, Mr. Alex Kwame Bonsu, said the Millennium Villages Health Project component has helped Amansie West a great deal in the area of child immunisation, care and support for people living with HIV (PLHIV), control of Malaria, infrastructure provision and others, in line with the government’s interventions for quality healthcare.
According to him, the MVP, in collaboration with the Novartis Foundation, is rolling out one of its successful health interventions dubbed “Telemedicine in April, 2014, where several diagnosis of diseases and ailments, as well as drug dispensation would be done via internet and telephone, for which two ambulances would be launched in April 2014 to augment the healthcare delivery system in the District.
Mr. Bonsu gave the assurance that as the Millennium Villages Project prepares to fold up in 2015, the District Assembly would be committed to ensure continuity of this all-important development programme in the District, especially in the health sector, within its mandate and resources for which a District Assembly/Millennium Villages’ Project Technical Committee to facilitate the process and ensure a smooth takeover of the project interventions at the district wide level has been formed.
The leader of the Parliamentary Committee, Mr. Yieleh Chireh, commended the team leader and management, as well as the Amansie West District Assembly, for a good work done to improve the living standard of the people in the cluster, and assured them that a report would be submitted to the Local Government Minister and Parliament for immediate consideration of the scale up of the laudable project to cover the entire Amansie West District.
The Member of Parliament for Manso-Nkwanta, Grace Addo, thanked the Parliamentary Select Committee on Health for the visit and inspection, and appealed to them to convey their experiences, with regards to the road network in the district, to the President.