Corporate Ghana’s Role In Community Infrastructural Development: The Ghana Electrometer Example

Social infrastructure and amenities are crucial to creating sustainable communities. However, the importance of these in everyday life is often taken for granted. Indeed, it is believe that, a society without basic amenities such as water, electricity, street lighting, roads, schools, hospitals etc, is socially and economically unattractive.

Investment in social amenities is therefore critical since they contribute significantly to people's quality of life. Imagine a sensitive place such as a hospital being without electricity, water or streetlights. Lack of key infrastructure such as these can pose a danger for patients and other members of that particular community.

Sadly, the provision of such amenities is often laid at the doorsteps of government bodies. However, government agencies alone cannot provide for all the amenities that society needs, hence the need for private sector partnerships. There are many organizations that have grasped the value of these kinds of collaborative efforts and are going beyond their mission of doing business and are improving the lives of members of communities where they operate. One such corporate institution is Ghana Electrometer; Ghana's sole meter production company.

Ghana Electrometer (GEM) has identified that certain parts of one of Ghana's big teaching hospital, Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) in Kumasi, remain dark at night. As a remedy to this, GEM has taken the initiative to provide streetlights at each of those locations in order to make the hospital more secure for patients and other members of the local community. The gesture, according to GEM, is to make it easy for people to move about the hospital freely at night.

The meter producing company, GEM, has also donated luminaries and other street lighting accessories to the hospital authority as backup measures. This is to ensure that prompt replacement can be performed any time the streetlights malfunction.

The handing over ceremony for the streetlights was a notable and stirring occasion. The management, staff and patients were full of admiration for GEM, as their long-held wish to have streetlights lighting up every part of the hospital was finally being fulfilled. For the Chief Executive Officer of KATH, Prof. Ohene Adjei, the gesture from GEM was quite timely.

He noted that many sensitive parts of the hospital were without lights and this had posed a danger for people, especially in the evenings. The professor was happy that the provision would illuminate these dark places and make the hospital safer for patrons and staff.

Ghana Electrometer provides the country with quality credit and pre-paid electricity meters through the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG). The company has deployed over 1,000,000 properly functioning prepaid and credit meters in many cities across the country. As a local initiative, Ghana Electrometer is providing jobs to over 300 Ghanaians directly and indirectly.