250 Youth to benefit from dry season farming project
About 250 youth from five districts along the Black Volta in the Upper West Region are to benefit from a new dry season farming project by the end of this year.
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The project, which is being spearheaded by the Regional Coordinating Council ( RCC), with support from the Northern Rural Growth Programme ( NRGP) and the Upper West office of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA), is aimed at halting migration of the youth from the region to the southern part of the country during the dry season.
The five districts are to select 50 youth from communities in the respective districts to participate in the project.
The Upper West Regional Minister, Dr Ephraim Avea Nsoh, who made this known at a media briefing in Wa, said experts from the NRGP and the MoFA would supply water pumping machines and train the beneficiaries on the use of the machines.
"In addition, the experts would assist in the selection of sites for the farms, as well as offer technical advice throughout the farming period. For now, we want to do this as a pilot and we hope to extend it from along the Black Volta to the other dams in the region when it becomes successful," he noted and stressed the need for the beneficiary districts to include more women in the selection process.
The dry season farming project, according to Dr Nsoh, was expected to engage many of the youth in order to discourage them from migrating to the southern part of the country during the dry season.
He said the Upper West Region had a lot of potential in the area of agriculture and that, the project would consider other cash crops apart from cereals and tubers.
The regional minister, therefore, called on the people to take advantage of the new initiative and make the best out of it.
Sharing his thoughts on why the security agencies must rigorously enforce the road traffic regulations in the region, Dr Nsoh, who had just returned from the Wa Regional Hospital, expressed sadness over the frequency with which people in the region were dying from accidents involving motorcycles.
“One out of the four people I visited at the hospital died just before we got there, another is paralysed while the other two, according to the doctors, are in very critical conditions" he lamented and called for closer police-community relations to nip the incessant motorcycle accidents in the region in the bud.
He further appealed to the media to intensify their education on road safety and said people who erected illegal speed humps must also be arrested and dealt with according to law.
That, he explained, was because the illegal speed humps were also killing a lot of people.