The youth of Damang and Huni Valley in the Prestea Huni Valley Municipality of the Western Region have as part of activities to mark this year’s World Clean Up Day undertaken a clean-up exercise of selected communities in their areas.
World Cleanup Day is an annual global social action programme aimed at combating the global solid waste problem, including the problem of marine debris.
This year’s celebration is on the theme “Cleaning up litter and mismanaged waste from our beaches, rivers, forests, and streets”.
The youth in the two communities in the Municipality with sponsorship from Gold Fields Damang Mine embarked on the exercise to clean up their respective principal streets.
The event saw hundreds of the youth clean up other areas such as lorry parks, market places, police station, health centres and community centres among others.
The President of the Damang Youth Association, Eric Kwame Gariba explained that the objective was to educate residents on the need to take sanitation in their various communities seriously.
He said the initiative was also to encourage the people to embrace the practice as their primary responsibility rather than the government.
Speaking to journalists after the about three hours exercise,, the CEO of Zero Waste Bosomtwi, which also collaborated with the youth emphasized that and the only way the celebration could be meaningful to the people is to free them from the filth.
He said “Our people could suffer from cholera and malaria as a result of filthy surroundings. So there was the for us to join the youth to mark the day with a clean up exercise”.
“I am appealing to the people of Damang and Huni Valley to keep their surroundings clean to avoid the outbreak of diseases”.
Abdel Razak Yakubu, Community Affairs and Stakeholder Engagement Manager of Goldfields Damang Mine, noted that the company supported the exercise with some tools and refreshment worth GHc12,000.00.
He said the youth in the two communities and Zero Waste approached Goldfields for assistant as they planned to mark the day with the cleanup exercise.
He mentioned the tools the company provided as rakes, wheelbarrows, cutlasses, shovels nose masks, hand gloves, sanitizers,, long brooms and some hoes among others.
He said after the exercise, the Water and Sanitation committee of the assembly will keep the tools for future clean up exercises.
He said as the company had demonstrated a high level of commitment in discharging its core duties, it was equally important for the people to complement its efforts by keeping their environment clean.