President of the Peasant Farmers Association, Dr. Charles Nyaaba, says it would prove disastrous for the one village one dam policy to be abandoned.
According to him, with the country already experiencing food insecurity and high food inflation, it will be most beneficial for the government to invest in building resilient and sustainable irrigations systems and dams to enhance agriculture in the northern regions.
His comment comes on the back of a JoyNews documentary, ‘Thirsty Dams’ done by Joojo Cobbinah which revealed that majority of the dams established under the one village one dam policy have failed to live up to expectation.
According to experts and stakeholders, the dams were shoddily constructed, hence, their inability to hold water for irrigation purposes.
Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, Dr. Nyaaba noted that while the project may have failed, government still has the opportunity to fix the situation.
He has called for repair works to be done on broken dams and bigger dams to be constructed in line with government specifications for districts.
“So what I think we need to do, one is to go and look at those dams that we can salvage and then try to repair the broken banks and then also expand the reservoir and then properly place the spillways and also create canals in those areas.
“Those areas that we think that we can actually do a big dam – because one of the proposals the districts were making was that they don’t really need dams in every village. It’s not every village that you can create dam there. Can we put the monies together and just get a proper place and ensure that within that district we create one very good big dam and then they’ll all go there. That’s another area.
“The other one is also to explore the solar system of irrigation where we rather drill boreholes at a central point and then you connect canals and pipes for the surrounding farmers to use,” he suggested.
