Alhaji Ibrahim Mohammed Baba, the Northern Regional Chairman of Road Contractors Association, has appealed to departments and agencies especially the state owned to award contracts to competent contractors to avoid the problem of shoddy work.

He said some departments and agencies sometimes awarded contracts to incompetent contractors resulting in shoddy work leading to collapse of buildings, road damage and sometimes roofs could not withstand rainstorms due to shoddy work.

Alhaji Baba made the appeal in Tamale on Monday during a training workshop for some 140 artisans from construction firms under the Association aimed at sensitizing them on the need to execute quality work.

The Skills Development Fund (SDF) and the Council for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (COTVET) are funding the two-day workshop with management of the Ghana Human Resource Associates being the main facilitators.

Mr Baba said roads and building infrastructure construction were permanent facilities and stressed the importance of executing quality work so that the facilities could have a long life span to save resources for other development projects.

He said training the artisans became necessary because some of them lacked the requisite knowledge of the job saying, “Additional training is needed for artisans especially in road construction to ensure that they contributed their quota towards executing quality work”.

He expressed appreciation to SDF/COTVET for the support to train the artisans and gave the assurance that road contractors in the Northern Region would strive harder to always execute quality work to continue to win the confidence of clients.

Mr Michael Avugah, main facilitator for the Ghana Human Resource Associates, said many artisans in the construction industry lacked the human resource skills for supervision while health and safety precautions were not always adhered to at construction sites.