Captured in this photo is a compelling scene of a mother of three making a precarious journey through the rains to take her children to school.

She gets to a flooded area. It is a culvert built by residents of Nmai Dzorn, Zoomlion.

The woman with a baby wrapped behind her, is seen struggling to cross the culvert on the road, with her two kids; one draped in a big black plastic bag, with the other in a raincoat, all of them, bare-footed.

While providing cover for her little baby with her umbrella, on one hand, she lifts the two up by the arm one after the other across the culvert, into the flooded area and together ‘journey’ on to school.

–

By: Caleb Kudah/citifmonline.com/Ghana

The post How mother defied the rain to take her 3 kids to school appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.

According to them, drivers of these trucks leave them loaded with refuse over a weekend before it is towed away.

They fear the the situation exposes them health hazards, as they also bemoaned the negative effect it is having on their businesses in the area.

‘They park it (the broken down trucks) during the weekends, Friday, and it will be there until Monday. The other time there was even a dead dog in it so you can imagine,” a baker in the area complained.

Over the years, business owners and residents who operate their businesses or live close to the Zoomlion Headquarters, have had to live with the sickening stench from broken down waste trucks of a company that has won awards for its role in collecting and managing waste in Ghana.

The residents claim every attempt to draw the attention of the Company has failed.

The residents say they find it ironic that the immediate surroundings of the beautiful edifice for one of Ghana’s leading waste management firms, is left unkempt with plastic waste dotted in gutters, amid bushes worsened by unbearable smell.

By: Caleb Kudah/citifmonline.com/Ghana

Twitter @Caleb Kudah

The post Nmai Dzorn residents lament pungent stench from Zoomlion HQ appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.

The Agro-processing facility which was completed in 2012 has a sheller, drier and storage facility for over 1,000 bags of maize and other cereals, but it is not being patronized by the farmers.

The facility also has a fumigator for treatment of the grains against germs and weevil infestation during the processing.

This came to light during a GNA’s Media Auditing and Tracking of Development Project in the Upper Manya Krobo District, being sponsored by Star-Ghana, met with some heads of department in the District at Asesewa.

Information available indicates that a private investor offered land and acquired some of the equipment for the facility as a condition for MIDA to construct the agro-processing center, which has now been handed over to the investor to operate.

To motivate the farmers to use the facility, before handing over to the private investor,  MIDA  organized a series of educational and sensitization workshops for over 20 farmer-based organizations (FBOs) involving over 1,000 farmers in the target districts on the benefits of the facility .

After handing over the facility, the new management ploughed the maize farms of registered members of the various FBOs, hoping that the beneficiaries would make use of the facility after harvesting, and store their maize and wait for  good market prices.

Currently, the cost of the storage of a bag of maize for a month is GhC1, while the cost of shelling and drying ranges from GhC1 to GhC10 a bag, depending on the moisture of the maize.

However, farmers in the catchment areas are small-scale farmers who have relied on the traditional methods of using their families, or hiring labour on daily basis, to do the shelling, drying and picking of foreign materials, and then storing in their homes, even though that practice has not been the best.

Some farmers also claimed that their farms are in the hinterlands and transportation of their crops to the facility at Asesewa is expensive.

The Upper Manya Krobo District Assembly and the District Directorate of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture,  were not formerly engaged in the project, and so they have limited information on the whole project.

Source: GNA

The post Multi-million-cedi grains processing center lying idle at Asesewa appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.