Tuesday, June 1, 2010

HOUSE NUMBERING PROJECT COMMENCES END OF YEAR (BACK PAGE, JUNE 1, 2010)

A project to facilitate the numbering of houses in the country by street names is to be rolled out before December this year.
Speaking at a validation workshop in Kumasi last Friday, the Deputy Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Mr Elvis Afriyie Ankrah, said the uniform street naming and building numbering system for the country would first be implemented in the regional capitals this year, to be followed by the district capitals next year.
To achieve that target, he indicated that the policy to guide its implementation would be ready this month.
He said the ministry was on course to end the system whereby places in the cities and other big towns were identified by objects such as kiosks and trees.
The workshop was attended by officers from the implementation agencies, including decentralised departments within the district assemblies and the police.
The numbering system of the past is fraught with a considerable range of challenges, including difficulty in locating persons and buildings.
This has led to low revenue mobilisation, inadequate service provision for houses and people and mounting difficulties associated with the provision of emergency services in times of fire, robbery, health emergencies, among others.
The deputy minister said it was to address these and other challenges that the ministry was charged to issue a framework to guide the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) to put in place a coherent addressing system that would also ultimately contribute to national development efforts, since it would facilitate better service delivery to the people.
Under the new system, all proposed street names will be approved by an MMDA statutory planning committee before implementation and approved street names cannot be changed through any local action.
Besides, all roads will be named, irrespective of whether they have dwelling units or business-related buildings or not.
Mr Afriyie-Ankrah said the proper implementation of the programme could generate about 50,000 jobs across the country.
The Co-ordinator of the programme, Mr Kwadwo Yeboah, said the naming of roads for new developments would be done during the period of developing sector layouts for the designed areas.
For private developments, he said, the developer was expected to submit the names of roads as part of the layout and the plan should be forwarded to the district assembly to avoid duplication.

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