The National Alternative Employment and Livelihood Programme (NAELP), in its quest for re-afforestation and reclamation of degraded farm lands and river bodies has created over 80.000 jobs in the process.
NAELP was launched in Tarkwa a year ago by President Akufo-Addo alongside Hon. Jinapor, Minister for Lands and Natural Resources to mitigate the ravaging effect of galamsey activities which have become a huge problem the government is dealing with frontally.
In an interview with the Chief Coordinator of NAELP to elicit her overview on the program a year on after it was launched and the way forward, Dr. Louise Carol Serwaa Donkor stated that establishing the program was spot-on, giving the unabated efforts by the military taskforce to halt the galamsey menace, there was also the need to create a safety basket to accommodate or absorb these young boys and girls into a more sustainable alternative livelihood.
She said, at the time that government had achieved some success with the GalamStop, Operation Halt and the rest of them, these guys became dormant and redundant and “therefore as a reasonable government when people loses their source of income and livelihood you need to step in with an intervention and hence the NAELP. What I’m saying is here is that this aspect does not in anyway excuse the illegality of galamsey, we forcefully say Galamsey is illegal and we do not support it as a government, these interventions are not so much about supporting or feeling obliged so much towards people who are doing illegality but its about the socio-conscious aspect of it.”
Dr. Serwaa Donkor explained that NAELP basically hinges on three pillars which is to (1) help with the restoration of the degraded lands and water bodies, (2) to help create job opportunity or alternative source of livelihood quite apart from galamsey and lastly (3)to ensure that Small Scale Mining is done the proper way that is responsible and sustainable.
She said, “So when you take land reclamation and afforestation, we see the levels of degradation and therefore something has to be done about it and that is the reclamation aspect, so we are restoring the lands back to it’s right chemical balance to support vegetation and actually put vegetation on it. We are reclaiming 1000hectars and we are likely to plant a million trees on theses 1000hectars”
The Chief Coordinator continued saying; ”Once the lands are reclaimed we are meant to put economic trees on it like rubber, oil palm and timber but some of the lands too won’t be able to sustain edible plants because sometimes you won’t be able to reclaim and extract all the pollutants in the soil at a level that should support edible plantation. So there are all these varieties of economic plants that we can plant depending on rate or the level at which the pollutants are extracted”
Again, she said, “Ghana has lost a huge forest cover close to about 1.4million hectars and the state of the environment and water beds are terrible and that’s why we are focused on areas where their operations have interfered with our water bodies either in thickening it or poisoning it. We are currently executing projects on Birim, Ofin, Densu and Pra rivers. We are not saying we’ve done all the reclamation on or around these river bodies but we have started and we will keep on doing that”.
“The second thing is about the 20million seedlings that we have been able to raise and we are immediately re-afforesting Ghana so we anchored this on the Green Ghana Project and we were able to raise 20million seedlings and the third thing is about employment and how many people we have been able to engaged and that is 80,000 people. We also have five main seedling sites namely Akoteafaso(E/R) Fofuo(A/R), Edinkra(btn C/R and A/R)Akotomu(W/R) and lastly Tiekyere(Ah/R) with the main satelites site in Hohoe” Dr. Seraa Donkor narrated.
