Minister for Food and Agriculture, Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto, has suggested that the One Village, One Dam initiative of the Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo government is an aspiration and not something that the government intends to achieve within the years it will be in power.
In a TV3 interview monitored, Dr. Afriyie Akoto said the One Village, One Dam is just a slogan of where the government wants the country to be in the future.
“(One Village, One Dam) is utopia because you cannot get irrigation to all farmers in Ghana. It is going to cost more than the GDP of Ghana to put irrigation (on every farm).
“It (One Village, One Dam) is a slogan, and a slogan is where you want to get to. It may take 10 years, it may take 20 years, but you start from somewhere. And you get people to understand that this is what you are trying to do,” he said.
The minister also said he is not aware of the number of dams the government has constructed so far since the One District On Dam project is not under his supervision.
“The One Village One Dam (programme) is under a different ministry, the Ministry of Special Initiatives. It wasn’t done under my administration. So, I can not account for it,” he noted.
On assuming office in 2017, the Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo-led government set out its plan to construct the dams under the One Village One Dam Initiative as part of the Infrastructure for Poverty Eradication Programme (IPEP).
The initiative focuses on rural and deprived communities, covering 56 districts in the 5 Northern Regions, with each district set to have 10 dams.