News:
President Akufo-Addo
March 30, 2022
President Nana Akufo Addo has given the clearest assurance that his government would complete the Agenda 111 projects by the end of his tenure. Delivering the State of the Nation Address, he said “we have every intention of seeing this project through to a successful end, which will enable me to commission all one hundred and eleven (111) hospitals before I leave office on 7th January 2025.
“Agenda 111 is an ambitious project, which must and will be done, and which will create some thirty-three thousand, nine hundred (33,900) jobs for construction workers, and, on completion, some thirty-four thousand, three hundred (34,300) jobs for health workers”.
According to him, like all major construction projects, it is evident that the initial schedule they gave for the completion of the Agenda 111 was overly ambitious. “Identifying suitable sites around the country, for example, has turned out to be even more problematic than had been anticipated. I am able to say that a great deal of the preparatory work has now been completed, and work has started at eighty-seven (87) of the one hundred and eleven (111) sites. I have been assured that preliminary work on the remaining twenty-four (24) sites is ongoing” he stated.
He said Agenda 111 is a product of the lessons learnt from the pandemic to dealing with such magnitude of health cases. “This pandemic exposed other shortcomings of our country, which have, undoubtedly, contributed to the anxieties that have befallen the nation. Agenda 111 was born out of this necessity to address some of these shortcomings. At the normal rate of growth, we are not likely to make up the deficit in our health facilities infrastructure for a very long time. Hence, the need for a special, dedicated programme of infrastructural development”.
Agenda 111 entails the construction of 111 entities, comprising standard 100-bed district hospitals for one hundred and one (101) districts without hospitals, with accommodation for doctors and nurses; six (6) new regional hospitals for each of the six (6) new regions; the rehabilitation of the Effia-Nkwanta Hospital in the Western Region; one (1) new regional hospital for the Western Region; and three (3) psychiatric hospitals for each of the three (3) zones of the country, i.e. North, Middle and Coastal.
Ghanamps.com