Joint Managing Director of Melcom Group, Mahesh Melwani cutting the tape to commission the toilet facility.
Over 700 hundred students in two schools in the South Tongu District of the Volta Region have benefitted from modern sanitary facilities.
Students of Tefle D/A and Sokpoe D/A Primary and Junior High School together with their teachers were using toilet facilities, the District Director of Education, Madam Evelyn Araba Zentey described as “Places of Inconvenience”.
However, thanks to the Melcom Care Foundation which is funded by the Melcom Group, the two schools now have five state of the art toilet facilities each which comes with a hand wash basin.
The water closet facility is connected to a water tank and water pump to ensure constant flow of water.
A group picture after the commissioning
The effluence is also connected to a bio digester to ensure that the schools bare no cost in emptying the liquid waste.
Rev. Nicholas Nuworkpor, the Headmaster of Tefle JHS who spoke on behalf of the two schools narrated that his 381 pupils shared a KVIP toilet facility with other clusters of schools as well as residents where the Tefle school is located.
He added that the location of their toilet is far from the class room and has no handwashing facility. The poor nature of the place has seen students and teachers going to their homes to attend nature’s call; a situation which leads to loss of contact hours.
Sharing of the poorly secured toilet facility with residents has often led to dispute over who cleans the place, particularly after weekends and vacations when students have been out of school.
The situation is not different from Same as Sokpe JHS which also shares its toilet facility with the community who have encroached on most of the school’s lands.
Rev Nuworkpor on behalf of the schools, teachers and students expressed gratitude to Melcom Foundation and Melcom Group and pleaded with them to consider equipping their computer lab which has only one partially functional computer.
He also appealed to other organisations and philanthropists to assist the school construct more classrooms to reduce overcrowding.
The Director of Communications at Melcom, Godwin Avenorbgor who described the gesture as a community development initiative said, the target of 64 washroom cubicles for 19 schools in nine regions will be extended to more schools and regions under a second phase program.
“This was because. the Group Chairman, Bhagwan Kubchandani, Joint Managing Director, Mahesh Melwani and all other management and staff of Melcom are pleased with the feedback received so far,” he said.
He noted that just as Melcom has grown from a single shop at the Accra Central Business District in 1981 to 48 shops nationwide and subsidiaries like Century Industries Limited, Crown Star, Melcom Travel and Tour and Melcom Hospitalities, so have many life changing jobs been created for thousands of Ghanaians nationwide.
The old facility used by Tefle D/A JHS pupils.
From Fred Duodu, Sogakofe (k.duodu@yahoo.com)