Mr Amadu Hamid, the Assembly Man for the Poyentanga Electoral Area in the Wa West District, has appealed to the government and philanthropic organisations to come to their aid by providing communities with clean water.

He observed that inadequate source of potable water was a major challenge affecting the people in all the seven communities in the electoral area.

Mr Hamid made the appeal in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at Poyentanga.

Talking on the water situation at Daribaayiri for instance, the Assembly Member said the residents shared the water source with animals, describing it as unhygienic.

“If you go to Deribaayiri, there is a dugout under a LEAP project at that community, which holds enough water, but their borehole is not functioning. So they fetch from the dugout and that is where the animals also go to drink,” he explained.

He also cited the Tampuoro community, where the two available boreholes that served as sources of potable water for the community had broken down.

He said he had been able to facilitate the repair of one of the boreholes for the community, but that they required about GHC3,500.00 to fix the second one as some unscrupulous persons had stolen all its parts.

“One NGO came to give the Tampuoro community a water filtering machine so that they can filter the stream water for use, but they can’t operate the machine. The NGO came and promised to drill a borehole for them, but since then I haven’t heard from them again,” Mr Hamid explained.

According to him, water was a basic necessity for human survival, but that the people in his electoral area were deprived of that basic need.

The increasing disparity in access to potable water in the Upper West Region, particularly at the rural level, had posed a serious challenge to the country in achieving goal six (6) of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The goal enjoins member states that were signatories to the 17 goals to ensure availability and sustainable management of water by its citizen by 2030.