A third year female science student of Mawuli School in Ho has suggested that measures to limit population growth in the country should go beyond mere exhortations.
Christine Dabo, was among 30 Mawuli School students taken on a guided tour of the Kpeve Water Treatment Works to mark World Water Day under the theme; “Water for the Cities: Responding to the Urban Challenge”.
She said the state, as done in some other over-populated countries, should institute policies that would reward people with no more than two children.
Miss Dabo said the policies should make families with more than two kids suffer biting social intervention exclusions.
She said only stringent measures could stop the inordinate growth in Ghana’s population.
World Water Day, instituted by the UN General Assembly and marked every March 22, this year focuses on the impact of rapid urban population growth on water needs.
Mr Emmanuel Appiah, Acting Volta Regional General Manager of the Ghana Water Company Limited, which organized the tour, had been speaking about the dangers the population drift from the rural areas to the cities posed to services including water and sanitation.
He said the high numbers leaving in shanty towns at the peripheries of the cities-informal settlements, which had no water, posed serious hazards to society.
Mr Appiah said high population growth represented a major problem for service providers and national development.
Questions the students asked included the number of treatment plants in the country, why the frequent shut down of water supply systems, and safety of “potable water”.
Mr Daniel Gezele, Manager of the four million gallons capacity Kpeve Water Station which supplies Ho and Peki, took the students through processes of water production and said about 51,000 Ghana cedis was spent on electricity alone every month.
At the close of the about two-hour tour, the consensus among students was that potable water was expensive, cannot be for free and must not be wasted.
Urban water coverage for the Volta Region at the end of 2009 was 39 per cent as against the national average of 59 per cent, a Ministry of Water Resources, Works and Housing document said.
The document said the region had 18 urban systems, the highest in the country.