Eco Brigade Hits Volta Region

Zoil Services Limited, a sister company of Waste Management Experts, Zoomlion Ghana Limited has unveiled the Volta Regional chapter of the Eco Brigade project with a clarion call on coastal dwellers to help make the project a success.

The Minister of Women and Children Affairs and Member of Parliament for North-Dayi Constituency, Ms Akua Sena Dansua, who made the call at Kpando-Torkor in the Volta Region, observed that in order to achieve its expected objectives of keeping our beaches and river banks and coastal landing points clean to promote tourism, communities who benefited from the project must be committed to the cause of the Eco Brigade initiative.

The event brought together dignitaries such as Ministers of State, MPs, DCEs and MMDCEs, Chiefs and other very important personalities.

The project, which involves the recruitment of 10,000 fisher folks from the coastal areas and communities along the major inland water bodies for its daily operations, was on the theme “Protecting the Coastal Heritage of Ghana.”

The Ministries of Environment, Science and Technology, Youth & Sports, Local Government and Rural Development, Food and Agriculture, Energy, Information, Health, and Tourism in collaboration with Zoil, organized the Volta Regional launch for its beach/bank cleaning, re-afforestation and oil spill response project dubbed “Zoil Eco Brigade” for the inland waters of Ghana.

The project also aims at cleaning our local beaches in an effort to make tourism attractive.

Minister for Women and Children Affairs And MP For North-Dayi Mrs Akua Sena Dansua Delivering her address at the function (Photo Credit William Beeko)

In a remark, the Chief of Kpando, Torgbui Dagadu VIII, hailed the Eco Brigade initiative acknowledging the immense benefits that it would bring to the various communities.

“This project would undoubtedly bring about employment as it is targeting to recruit about 10,000 people from fish landing points and fishing villages along the coast of inland water bodies in the country especially the Volta Lake,” noted the Chief of Kpando.

He, however, made a passionate appeal to Zoomlion Ghana Limited and government to help establish a fishing training centre in Kpando where fishermen would be professionally trained in order to prevent avoidable boat and canoe disasters.

“Most of our fishermen here use their raw natural sense of judgment as humans to control some of these disasters and lacked the professional way of tackling some of these disasters that usually occur as a result of the wind that blows on the Volta Lake,” lamented Torgbui Dagadu.

For her part, the Minister for Tourism, Mrs Juliana Azumah Mensah, commended the organizers of the project since it sought to harness the tourism potential of Ghana’s coastal and fishing communities.

The Deputy Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Mr Elvis Afriyie Ankrah, in his address pledged government’s commitment to help achieve the expected results of the initiative.

He assured inhabitants of Kpando that Professor Mills and the NDC administration would not relent in working hard to achieve the ‘Better Ghana Agenda’ declared by the President.

In a brief statement, the Manager of Zoil Services Limited, Mr S.A. Opoku Manu, disclosed that since it launched the project officially barely four weeks ago in Esiama, in the Western Region, more than 3,000 people from fishing communities on the coast of the Western and Central Regions were undergoing orientation to start work in the next couple of days.

“If one casts a glance around, one cannot lose sight of the reason why the Germans prized these areas and were prepared to fight to keep it,” he pointed out.

He continued: “It is the responsibility of every Ghanaian therefore to contribute to ensure the sustenance of this God given heritage.”

FROM WILLIAM BEEKO, KPANDO-TORKOR-V/R