Accra, Aug. 19, GNA - The Wassa Association of Community Affected by Mining (WACAM) on Wednesday asked the Executive to come out with a new development paradigm that would be more human- centred instead of policies that focus on resource development.

Mrs Hannah Owusu-Koranteng, Director of Training and Research of WACAM, who made the request explained that the human specie is the most valuable asset, which transforms the resources of any nation to wealth, hence the need to make the human being the centre of all development policies.

Mrs Owusu-Koranteng was delivering a paper prior to the launch of a manual and news letter of WACAM.

WACAM is a community based organisation that exists to protect the environment and work in selected mining communities in Ghana. The manual, will be a guiding principle and building of the capacity of people engaged in advocacy in mining communities. Mrs Owusu-Koranteng said the document would address issues related to violations of social and economic rights as spelt in the Constitution, as well as address environmental degradation. "With our 10 years experience of working with communities, we realized that there are a lot of capacity gaps. People have absolutely no knowledge about their rights and responsibilities and some of the multi-national organisations take advantage of the situation to exploit the people."

She said the manual would help people to understand their rights and responsibilities and eventually strengthen environmental and economic justice.

Mr Ibrahima Aidara, West Africa Regional Governance Officer of Oxfam America, said: "Most of the time mining affected communities are remote and distant from centres of decision making and information. The lack of formal education limits their ability to understand decisions. and to influence them."

He expressed the hope that the training manual will be very useful for Oxfam Africa's Educational Initiative programme in terms of knowledge sharing and building a knowledge based community. Mr Daniel Owusu-Koranteng, Executive Director of WACAM, said Ghana had failed to effectively regulate the mining industry resulting in many social, economic, environmental and technical problems. He noted that the power imbalance in the engagement of the mining communities and the multinational mining companies encourage the mining companies to play technical games, which goes a long way to affect the people in the communities.

"Our work with the mining communities convinces us that the top-down policy making approach had always resulted in failures, because policy makers had failed to acknowledge that most of the lasting solutions to our development problems could be found in majority of the people who are the reason for formulating development policies." Commenting on the manual and the newsletter, he commended Mr Kwadwo Kwarteng, formerly of the Daily Graphic and Mr Boakye Dankwa Boadi, the Supervising Chief Editor at the Ghana News Agency for their support in making it a reality.

Ms Joana Manu, Representative of Women in WACAM, said women suffered the most in mining communities because of the domestic work they are involved in.

She therefore lauded the launch of the manual and said it would help people in rural communities to know their rights. Rev. Fr. Patrick Amos of the Catholic Bishops Conference Secretariat, who launched the manual and the newsletter, said he believed that WACAM was fulfilling a constitutional mandate of informing the citizens and expressed the hope that the manual would go a long way to buttress the democracy that all Ghanaians were enjoying.