Story: Vincent Amenuveve, Savelugu
THE Savelugu-Nanton District is to become one of the industrial hubs of northern Ghana by 2025. The district, which is located along the Tamale-Bolgatanga road, is about 15 minutes drive from the Northern Regional capital, Tamale.
The strategic location of the district and its nearness to the Tamale Airport requires that the area be face-lifted to contribute to the industrial growth of the region.
To that effect, the district has been selected as one of the six pilot areas for the implementation of the new planning system for Ghana. Under the 15-year Spatial Development Framework (SDF) of the district, the area would become the spatial planning element of Medium Term Development Plans (MTDPs) aligned with regional and national planning policies.
Under the programme, stakeholders including developers, government, utility companies, communities and individuals will help create a congenial atmosphere for accelerated development of the district.
The present policy of concentrating support on existing villages, diversifying agriculture from traditional methods in order to provide food security and providing basic village levels of infrastructure, health and education, is the basis for the initial period of the plan which covers five years.
Efforts will be concentrated on better road access to villages rather than regional connectivity or urban infrastructure.
In the next five years, the district’s development will be focused on making the area attractive to large-scale investors by ensuring that large tracts of land are available for investment. Already, Integrated Tamale Fruit Company (ITFC) has invested huge resources in mango cultivation in the district.
there are plans to establish food processing, packaging and distribution facilities at Savelugu.
Additionally, higher education and research for this type of agriculture will be expanded at Pong-Tamale.
Under the SDF, settlements such as Gushie, Diare and Pong-Tamale will be supported to grow to accommodate the increasing wage-based and more job-secured population.
At a recent workshop at Savelugu to inaugurate a draft paper on the SDF, the International Planning Expert, Dr Christopher Cripps said 90 per cent of the working population in Savelugu is engaged in agriculture with about 70 per cent being subsistence farmers.
According to him, commercial farmers constituted the remaining 30 per cent of the farmers with farm sizes between 20 and 120 acres per farm.
Dr Cripps further stated that agro-processing constituted the main industrial activity in the district and includes sheanut processing, groundnuts processing, cotton ginnery and rice processing. Others are carpentry, blacksmithing, dressmaking and fish processing.
He stated that trading and service activities employed only three per cent of the economically active population. This includes public servants and petty traders.
The expert mentioned a number of challenges that the SDF was expected to address.
They are low household incomes and food insecurity, high illiteracy rate and lack of education generally among the working population.
Emerging urban settlements such as Savelugu and Pong-Tamale are unplanned with little or no infrastructure. Other development challenges include high youth unemployment, high level of unskilled labour, unhealthy environmental conditions, lack of coverage of electricity in half of the communities in the district and dilapidated school and health facilities.
Dr Cripps further stated that such issues as reducing the percentage of households that run out of food by the second quarter of the year needed to be critically examined during the implementation of the SDF.
“There is the need to increase electricity coverage to 80 per cent of the district as well as improve feeder roads and extend fixed line services to the district,” he said.
According to him, access to potable water and sanitation facilities needed to be increased while making sure that all the six Area Councils were operational.
The Project Manager, Mr Alistair Blunt stated that there were major problems facing land use and spatial planning in the country.
He said the Land Use Planning Law was out-of-date based on the Town Planning Ordinance of 1945( Cap 84).
He said planning authorities were under-resourced, saying 69 out of 170 Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) had professional land use and spatial planners.
Other challenges include poor linkage between planning and registration of plots, lack of a linkage between social and economic development policies and spatial plans, lack of adequate and up-to-date base maps.
Mr Blunt said the overall objective of the Land Use Planning and Management Project was to help the growth of the Ghanaian economy through the revival and modernisation of an effective land use planning and management system that facilitates the implementation of spatial and land use plans.
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