Bridging the infrastructure gap

Infrastructural development is considered to be one of the key elements of poverty alleviation.

The availability of infrastructure often acts as a catalyst for accelerated development and enhances the impact of interventions to improve the poor’s access to various social amenities.

For instance, without roads, the poor are not able to sell their output on the market.

Without electricity, the industrialisation process, which provides the poor an important source of employment, is unlikely to take off.

Without school structures, many social interventions to guarantee quality education will not make the desired impact.

Without health, water and proper sanitation facilities, no amount of medical support can suffice and for that matter good health will be at risk.

Research has it that many of the world’s poor people live in rural areas isolated by distance, terrain and poverty from employment and economic opportunities, markets, health care and education.

There is clear evidence that rural isolation is associated with low agricultural productivity linked to poor market access.

Here in Ghana, this canker of the lack of infrastructure exists not only in the rural areas of the country but also in the cities where roads in particular are bad.

It is against this background that the government has budgeted to spend about some GH¢9.3 billion next year as it seeks to provide enhanced infrastructure where they lag and fix some of the broken ones.

The Minister of Finance in presenting the 2020 Budget Statement and Economic policy of the government did not elaborate on this but indicated that the amount earmarked to be spent was the biggest so far.

The Daily Graphic finds the budget intentions a welcome move.

This is because it will go a long way to stimulate economic activity in the country.

For instance, contractors will have some work to do.

Through this, they will be able to maintain their workforce and pay them some decent wages.

In the area of roads, for instance, the Vice President has recently cut the sod for the construction of some inner roads in Cape Coast in the Central Region, Dodo-Pepeso in the Oti Region, and Hinahini in the Ashanti Region.

The projects are expected to be executed with funds from the Synohydro funds.

The Daily Graphic notes that allocations from the budget alone cannot give the country all it requires and we are happy there is money from other sources to support the government’s development efforts.

While we celebrate this move, we will also want to sound a word of caution to the contractors who are likely to win some of the contracts to execute these important national projects.

As a concern, we are aware of many instances where some contractors, for whatever reason, have never been able to execute works under government contracts to specification. There are also many instances where projects paid for are never executed.

Knowing how difficult it has been to raise funds internally, it is imperative and a call to national duty, for contractors to ensure that once they are awarded contracts, they will do all in their power as patriotic citizens to execute the projects to specification.

As a nation, we all owe it a duty to discharge or play our individual and collective roles more diligently to ensure that we succeed together.

The era where people cut corners should end. We need to ensure that the amount voted for roads under the budget is spent judiciously to enable the projects to stand the test of time.