Ayiesu (E/R), June 1, GNA - The Eastern Regional Minister, Dr Francis Osafo-Mensah, has commended Christian missionaries for their immense role in the provision of access to education since the pre-independence era to benefit the country.

He was inaugurating a 158-million-cedi block of three classrooms for the Ayiesu Anglican Junior Secondary School, near Begoro, in the Fanteakwa District on Monday.

The Fanteakwa District Assembly and the Inter-Diocesan West Africa Link (IDWAL), friends of the Anglican Church in Harling Island in the UK, jointly financed it.

Dr Osafo-Mensah re-iterated government's commitment to ensuring that all children of school going-age would have access to education and called on the parents to allow the teachers to enforce discipline in the school without threats or harassment when their wards were punished for an offence.

The Fanteakwa District Chief Executive, Mr Ebenezer Ofoe-Ceasar, commended the Harling group for their commitment to help provide the basic needs of the people in the area to complement the assembly's initiative.

He mentioned the construction of a foot bridge, a bore-hole and the advance payment for the supply of Kerosene under the government's rural kerosene supply programme as some of the relief projects undertaken by the IDWAL for the people in the area.

A representative of the IDWAL, Mrs Carol Bailey, who announced that the group would furnish the school block with tables and chairs, said it was also in the process of constructing a clinic in the area as part of their continuous efforts at improving the well being of the people. The Anglican Bishop of the Koforidua Diocese, Rt. Rev. Fr. Francis Quarshie, said education was important in the life of every developing country and called on the people in the area to send their children to school in appreciation of the gesture by the philanthropists. He reminded the people of the resources spent to provide the school and urged them to contribute their quota by providing for the educational needs of their children to justify the resources used on the project, adding "if your children are not sent to the school, it remains only a building and a waste of resources on the part of the financiers."