Chief Executive Officer of the Northern Development Authority (NDA) Dr Alhassan Sulemana Anamzooya has urged northerners across the globe with expertise and resources to come back home to support government to develop the northern sector of the country.
He said support for government, its development partners and agencies will help bridge the economic and social inequalities between the north and south.
According to him, people of northern extraction everywhere in the world have a responsibility to come home with their talents, skills and financial strength to help develop northern Ghana.
Dr Anamzooya also implored those at home, to be prudent and modest in spending resources that are sent to them by their siblings abroad either to develop their houses or create business opportunities in the regions.
The NDA Chief Executive Officer made the call when he addressed the first Anniversary of the Northern Ghana Development Conference at Bolgatanga in the Upper East region last Thursday.
Dr Anamzooya believes the judicious use of such resources can actually be the basis of trust building and development in the northern zone.
“Apart from the government and its partners in development, we also have a moral obligation to see to the closing of the social and economic inequalities amongst us as northern Ghanaians”, he reiterated.
The Akufo-Addo administration in 2017 through an act of parliament, Act 963, established the Northern Development Authority to provide a framework for the accelerated economic and social development of the Northern Development Zone and also to coordinate all other development efforts in the north.
As a result, the NDA has become the vehicle for implementation of the government’s one million dollar per constituency initiative dubbed the Infrastructure for Poverty Eradication Programme (IPEP).
The programme is providing basic but critical infrastructural development for Ghanaians across all constituencies in the country.
The IPEP initiative
Through the Infrastructure for Poverty Eradication Programme, the NDA has awarded over 2,000 contracts for projects, which are currently at various stages of completion.
Dr Anamzooya explained that this is a new trajectory of development with the bottom-up approach aimed at improving livelihoods in deprived communities.
He revealed that about 15,000 short term jobs for various artisans in the construction value chain have been created.
“As we speak, contractors are busily constructing roads, hospitals school blocks, chip compounds, market centres, snake bite centres, community centres, boreholes, bridges, and supplying school furniture across the Northern enclave.
“In pursuit of this one million per constituency policy, the Ministry of Finance released a conditional amount of GH¢1,724,383,246.15 to all three development authorities.
Out of this amount, the Northern Development Authority was allocated GH¢266,760,000 to implement these projects”, he added.
The Northern Ghana Development Conference provides a platform for a non-partisan discussion on how to accelerate the development of Northern Ghana.
