Residents of Kolug-Tengir community, a suburb of Bawku Municipality in the Upper East Region, have called on the government to effectively use the Population and Housing Census data to properly and evenly distribute development projects across the country.

Members of the community indicated that the previous census had not brought the needed development to the area as the community was lagging in terms of basic social amenities.

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, the residents expressed dissatisfaction over the poor state of the community and noted that the PHC was meant to enable stakeholders to properly plan and evenly distribute development, however, the community was still in extreme poverty.

They said the impact of the previous exercise had not been felt in the lives of the people and therefore urged the government to make a paradigm shift from developing urban areas to using the data to implement pro-poor policies that would help uplift the rural dwellers.

The residents mentioned the lack of potable water, toilet facilities, health facilities, electricity, good roads, and farm inputs such as the subsidized fertilizer, saying the community did not have anything to make life comfortable.

Mr Mohammed Annaba, a resident, noted that members of the community had all been fetching water from one borehole, compelling some to travel far distances to access water.

Ms Dorothy Musa, another resident said the community did not have toilet facilities which compelled residents to practice open defecation and were sometimes bitten by snakes and scorpions.

Mr Osman Ibrahim, another member of the community, said the community needed a healthcare facility since the situation had forced residents to always travel to neighbouring communities to seek health care, making it unbearable to the already poor people who had to spend much money on only transport to those communities.

Mr Ibrahim, therefore, called on the government and other charitable bodies to support the community with a healthcare facility to make it easy for residents to have easy access to quality health services.

Ms Mboad Aban said the community had not been connected to the national grid and the situation was affecting education in the area as school children could not study at night.

Some people could not engage in productive businesses especially those that required the use of electricity, he added.