Kosmos Energy under its social flagship project has presented assorted food items under its Hunger Relief programme to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 pandemic to three institutions.
The $50,000 package comes with building the capacity of these three institutions by training them in mushroom production, snail and vegetable farming.
This, according to Kosmos Energy, will be used to feed Prison Inmates and to produce enough to generate income. It is also to equip the inmates with skills in agriculture after serving their term to be self-reliant.
The Intuitions to benefit from this training are the James Camp Prisons, Senior Correctional Center formerly known as Borstal Institute and Light Outreach Foundation.
About 400 families under the Livelihood Against Extreme Poverty (LEAP) will also receive support. The initiative which is under the Kosmos Innovation Centre, KIC the Corporate Social Responsibility unit of the company will also provide the required structures for convenient farming.
Speaking at the presentation and groundbreaking ceremony in Accra, Senior Vice president and Head of Ghana Business Unit, Cosmos Energy, Joe Mensah, says the move is to empower young inmates to have the skill to fall on when they are released from prison.
“We are cutting sod to teach people in the Correctional Institution how to farm in mushrooms and snails, so when they leave these premises they will have something to leave on. Otherwise, it becomes a vicious cycle, they go and come back to Prison. We want to cut that cycle by teaching them something they can do. There is a saying that you can give a fish to a man he will eat for a day but if you teach him how to fish he will eat forever,” Mr. Mensah intimated.
The Director-General of Ghana Prisons Service, Patrick Missah, said he is hopeful that the project will go a long way to help inmates learn and develop their skills. Mr. Missah said the Kosmos project is timely in the face of resource constraints due to Covid-19.
“I wish to assure you that this project will succeed and will be replicated in other Prisons. Snail rearing and mushroom growing have been with us for quite some time now but in the Ghana Prisons Service, these have been relatively new areas. So we are very glad that Kosmos Energy has taken it upon them to venture into this field to give us the expertise, so we can also impact Prisoners. I am hopeful that the project will help us to go a long way to enable us to achieve the necessary knowledge to develop the skills of Inmates,” Mr. Missah added.
Story by: Mabel Adorkor Annang.
