Hajia Lariba Zuweira Abudu, the Member of Parliament for Walewale constituency in the North East region has announced plans to establish an endowment fund to cater for widows in the West Mamprusi municipality.
The lawmaker who doubles as the Deputy Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection announced this on Thursday, December 30, 2021, when she distributed hampers and cash amount to over six hundred widows in her constituency ahead of the New Year celebration.
The MP has already committed an amount of twelve thousand Ghana cedis (GHS12,000) even before the official launch of the fund in the coming weeks.
She explained the fund when instituted would be used as a tool to offer various forms of support to the widows and business startup capitals, adding some of them, their businesses are so minute that if you give them GHS500, they can ran a business and become independent and economically viable.
The sustainable development goals eight talks about decent work and economic growth by 2030 and the step taken by the lawmaker promotes that UN convention.
The international poverty rate in Ghana for the year 2021 was forecast at 11.3 percent and the poverty margins is more critical and endemic in the five regions of northern Ghana particularly at the rural and some per-urban communities.
This has resulted in hundreds of teenagers and adults traveling to the cities in the south for none-existing jobs for better living conditions.
“So if you have that fund with good people to manage it, at least, they can actually go there and get some funding for whatever they want to do” she emphasized.
This is described as historic by Issahaku Aremeyaw Somo, the Municipal Chief Executive for the West Mamprusi area. According to him, the gesture made by the MP is the first of its kind and commended the legislator for helping to alleviate the plight of the people.
Aside the donation, the MCE indicated the MP is also collaborating with the assembly to get some infrastructure development from central government to give a facelift to the road network in the municipality.
Meanwhile, the Deputy Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection on Thursday distributed hampers to over six hundred widows in her constituency costing a total amount of GHS275,000.
Each hamper contained 5kg bag of rice, tomato paste, cooking oil, salt, maggi and a cloth for each of the beneficiary women. In addition, each woman also went home with an amount GHS50 to enable their upkeep for some time.
“When I was going round doing the campaign, in my interaction with some of the women, I realized that most of them were widows and how to feed is a problem and Christmas is here so what do we do to them? And I was thinking of organizing a party for them but how many people can you invite to do a party; because they are coming from the over 100 communities that we have in the constituency, so I decided to some friends and party elders and they supported me” Hajia Lariba told The Custodian Online in an exclusive interview.
However, she mentioned the initiative was successful due to the benevolence of the Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, Chief of Staff, Akosua Frema Opare, Dr KB Mahama, some of her colleague MPs and other individuals who supported the initiative.
