One village one dam policy to begin in the north

Government has selected some communities which will be benefiting from the first batch of the One Village One Dam programme.

This follows an earlier confirmation by the Deputy Minister for Food and Agriculture, Dr Sagre Bambangi, that the initiative will officially kick off in the next dry season which is predicted to begin in December 2017.

Responding to questions in Parliament, Dr Bambangi said: “in fact, engineers and some other experts have gone all-out in the communities and already done some assessment, and so we have the first batch of communities that will benefit from this programme immediately we kick-start”.

These initial benefiting communities are said to be mostly in the Northern Region of the country.

In addition, the Deputy Minister pointed out that the programme will include the repairs of existing dams in the country – particularly, the reconstruction of the Kasa Small Scale Irrigation Dam.

“With the 1 Village, 1 Dam programme, we are going to repair existing dams that can be of good use to our people in Northern Ghana as well as the Savannah zones, and we are hoping to capture it in the 2018 budget and then we tackle the dams,” he said.

The One-Village-One-Dam project forms part of the flagship initiatives of the President Nana Akufo-Addo led administration targeted at facilitating an all-year-round agricultural productivity in the three regions that make up Northern Ghana - specifically, in the construction of irrigation dams across that region and is expected to cost about Ghc2 billion.