Trainee teachers at the Evangelical Presbyterian College of Education in Bimbilla in the Nanumba North Municipality, say the school’s perennial challenge with access to water is taking a serious toll on their lives and academic work.
The school, which is one of the three teacher training colleges in the Northern Region, has had water challenges for over forty years with just one borehole serving the entire school.
Some students in a Citi News interview said, said the situation is affecting their studies and must be urgently addressed.
“In the ladies dormitory, scrubbing is a major thing as well as bathing and washing. We need water to carry out all these chores. Because of the lack of water, normally we will go to class late because we need to travel far to fetch water,” one student said.
“It is quite interesting how we are able to survive. Looking around you could easily see that we are using these yellow cans and at the end of every week we have to buy one can of water for 0.70 pesewas. So, within a month we spend more than GHC100 on water,” another student lamented.
But the Principal of the school, Ibrahim James Gurundow M-Minibo said efforts to address the problem have not been successful.
“I tried to source water around but there isn’t any water source nearby. So, we contracted someone in the area to do that. Really, four wells were dug but we got water in only one because the experts are saying the water table here is very low. We have sought the concern of council to go all out to source underground water so we can extend it to this place,” he noted.
Evangelical Presbyterian College
The Evangelical Presbyterian College of Education in Bimbilla in the Nanumba North Municipality of the Northern Region is affiliated to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.
The college is faced with other challenges including inadequate infrastructure and weak security.
This year, the school admitted 401 students comprising of 247 males and 154 females.