Dr. Louise Carol Serwaa Donkor
COORDINATOR for the National Alternative Employment and Livelihood Programme (NAELP) for illegal miners, Dr. Louise Carol Serwaa Donkor, says her outfit is committed to providing mining-related skills to persons involved in illegal mining and preparing them for better jobs both home and abroad.
According to her, this forms part of NAELP’s efforts at tackling the menace of illegal mining, which has had severe impact on the country’s natural environment.
Speaking in an interview with DAILY GUIDE Monday in Accra, Dr. Donkor reiterated that her outfit’s main focus in providing the training was to enable the persons involved in illegal mining find sustainable jobs in large-scale mining companies.
“When it comes to mining related skills for instance, there are those that we would want to teach how they can fabricate small tools to support agriculture as well as small tools to support mining. We also want to train people in skills where they can be integrated into the large-scale mining companies,” she stated.
She added that there is certification for participants after the training which could enable them work in any mining company in the world and not only in Ghana.
Deforestation
Lamenting on the increasing rate of deforestation and depletion of Ghana’s vegetation, Dr. Donkor revealed that Ghana now only boasted of about 40 per cent of arable lands, which comes as a huge deficit to the 60 per cent it had a few years ago.
“So when you take land recollection and reforestation, we know that the lands are degraded. We’ve all seen some, we know that. We’ve seen the degradation of the land and something has to be done about it,” she stressed.
She underscored that her outfit, in addressing the menace, was making efforts to reclaim some of the lands that have suffered destruction due to illegal mining activities, especially in areas close to water bodies.
“What this means is that we focus on the areas where their [illegal mining] operations have interfered with our water bodies, either in thickening it or poisoning it.
“There is for instance River Birim, Densu, Offin, Pra and all the other major rivers that we are crying about. So the communities that we are reclaiming, we look at their proximity to river bodies and reclaim them,” she intimated.
She, however, added that when lands are reclaimed, they are expected to grow economic trees like rubber, oil palm, timber trees as well as edible trees including oil palm and coconut trees on them, adding that: “We have started and we will keep on doing that.”
Employment Creation
Quite recently, she said more than 80,000 people, including illegal miners, gained direct and indirect jobs under the NAELP initiative by government since its rollout a year ago.
Of the beneficiaries mainly from mining communities, 16,920 were engaged in Akotom in Western Region; 27,280, in Adinkra and 500 in Fufuo, both in the Ashanti Region; while 16,002 were engaged at Techire in the Ahafo Region; and 18,869 in Akwatiakwaso in the Eastern Region.
The remaining 500 had employment at Hohoe in the Volta Region as an intervention for residents of the region and Oti, particularly those who were found to have moved to the mining areas to work.
Dr. Donkor had additionally said her outfit was working at five main seedling sites and a satellite site at Hohoe to raise 20 million seedlings to support massive reafforestation efforts anchored on the 2022 Green Ghana tree planting exercise.
She, therefore, called on the youth in mining areas to tap into opportunities offered by NAELP and get themselves trained for sustainable and less risky jobs which could open them up for opportunities in large-scale mining companies with good incomes.