Establishment environmental courts - New Year School

Accra, Jan.2, GNA- Participants at the 56th Annual New Year School, that placed the searchlight on efforts to boost wealth creation in the country, at the weekend, called on the government to establish special courts that would deal expediously with environmental offences. There should also be collaboration between the chiefs, opinion leaders, civil society groups, the security agencies, the Judiciary and the district assemblies in enforcing environmental laws.

The country's boarding school system should be reinforced to foster friendship among the youth from different parts of the country. These were some of the recommendations made by the 160 participants that attended the School, organised by the Institute of Adult Education of the University of Ghana, on the University campus, at Legon in Accra.

The School was on the broad theme: Wealth Creation for Accelerated National Development: Imperatives and Challenges."

The cross section of participants including traditional rulers; professionals; representatives from the National Commission for Civic Education, Ghana National Association of Teachers and civil society groups called for the re-introduction of civics to boost the fledgling democratic process and the commencement of a subject on peace education.

They expressed the need for the state to equip the various technical and vocational schools with modern workshops, to promote science and technology.

The School called for a macro-economic policy that would support women entrepreneurs to be self-sufficient through access to land, credit and training packages to facilitate wealth creation.. Information, Communication and Technology should be introduced on the schools curricula.

A taskforce should also be set up to see to the implementation of the present and past recommendations of the School.

The topics that characterised the panel discussions, symposiums, study group interactions and the plenary sessions were: " Financial Institutions and Wealth Creation", " Modernising Agriculture for Accelerated Wealth Creation", "Education and Training for Wealth Creation", "Science Technology and Accelerated Wealth Creation", " Private Sector Growth and Accelerated Wealth Creation, "The Burden of Disease and Wealth Creation," and the "The Debt Burden, HIPC and Development Assistance."

Few of the participants have attended the School between 10 and 53 consecutive times.

One of them, Mr Kwamina Hagan, a retired Agriculturist, told the Ghana News Agency that the activities at the School are now rich in content, but expressed the hope that there would be more room for socialisation among participants in future.