Regional News of Saturday, 17 January 2015

Source: GNA

Focus on the development of the rural communities

Deputy Coordinating Director of the Asante-Akim South District, Mr. Isaac Obeng Aboagye, has called for the allocation of more resources towards the development of rural communities.

He said there was the need for the assemblies to ensure equity and fair distribution of projects, so that no community was marginalized.

He was speaking at a workshop held to disseminate the 2010 Population and Housing Census to key stakeholders at Juaso.

The programme organized by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) was meant to brief the people on key areas of the census and educate the citizenry on the outcome of the exercise.

It is the first time in post-independence Ghana that such report is being disseminated at the district level.

Mr. Aboagye said from the District’s census report, 83 per cent of the area’s population of 117,245 lived in rural communities.

Again, about 86 per cent of the 20,887 housing stock were found in these communities and he said these were enough justification to focus and channel more resources to those places.

Mr. Emmanuel Osei, a representative of the GSS, said the dissemination of the census report was to involve the people in the exercise for them to appreciate the need to cooperate in subsequent activities.

He said that through the help of technology the exercise had improved tremendously over time and asked the participants to educate the people on the essence of the census.

He identified ethnicity, religion and boundaries as some of the challenges the GSS faced during the last census and he said he was confident that these would be minimized in subsequent ones.