One year in office: MP for Suaman prioritizes Education, Health and Youth Development

Marking his first anniversary as Member of Parliament for Suaman in the Western Region, Hon Joseph Betino set to focus his development agenda on education, health, agriculture and youth development and empowerment as his priority.

The move, according to him, is to increase literacy, improve the health condition of his constituents, improve farming productivity and build the youth for the future.

Hon Betino disclosed this to EXPRESSNEWSGHANA, during an exclusive interview in Parliament to mark his first anniversary in Parliament after the election of 2020.

Suaman is one of the agrarian Constituencies in the country and produced cash and food crops in quantity including cocoa, timber, maize, cassava, cocoa yam, among others, but many of the youth who either completed Junior High or Senior High schools face the difficulties of furthering to the tertiary level.

Additionally, access to healthcare remained a mirage as most of the farming communities could not access primary healthcare within their locality and had to trek several kilometers in other to access healthcare.

Similarly, the teeming youth though with many talents also lacks the opportunities to unlock the talents and have to loiter around despite the abounding resources.

This, Hon Betino said, most of these needy challenges have spurred him to rethink prioritizing education, health, the youth and other interventions policies through his shares of MPs Common Fund and other statutory funds to face the challenges in other to increase resilience to future development.

To mitigate the school drop-out and learning losses; accelerate the education transformation, the MP said he has disbursed school fees for over 90 students at various Tertiary education institutions, purchased and supplied over 550 both Hexagonal, Dual and Mono desks to about eight basic schools, visited schools during “My first Day in School,” and as well distributed Mathematical sets to all the 2021 candidates for the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in the Constituency.

Touching on the Health sector, the MP who sounded passionately about the needs of his constituents said he had within his first year donated six Motorbikes to the District Health Directorates, donated equipment and medical supplies to the main Health centre and also provided Containers to serve as health post at the Gyampakrom community.

To empower the youths to unlock their talents, the Suaman lawmaker said he has donated 50 sets of Jersey and 50 footballs to the various youth groups in the communities and also supported over 120 youth , especially the females in apprentices for various professional training.

Besides the youth, Hon Betino said he supported Persons with Disabilities with Wheel Chairs to enable them to move from one place to another freely without the need of a person assisting them.

As a lawmaker who needed counseling from the elders to be able to implement his vision, Hon Betino said he organized and distributed food items to the needy, the aged and other vulnerable persons in the constituency as part of his social intervention policies.

He expressed his commitment to ensuring that Suaman received the needed development attention and urged the youth to feel free to seek his support in anything they believed he would be able to support.

He further reiterated his promise to execute a “Health for All “agenda to enable constituent’s access to healthcare in every community with CHPS Compound in other to eradicate diseases and other ailments affecting their wellbeing.

The MP assured that, despite the overwhelming economic hardship imposed on Ghanaians by the current New Patriotic Party (NPP) government, he would work hard to honour his campaign promises to justify the confidence response in him on December 7, 2020.

He thanked the Constituents for voting for him in 2020 and reaffirms his commitment to ensuring that the development needs of the people are met.

Currently, in parliament, Hon Betino is a member of Food, Agriculture and Cocoa Affairs and the Standing Order Committees of Parliament.

He said his focus is to also work hard to secure presidential victory for his party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to complement his victory for the development of the constituency and Ghana as a whole.