Civil society sensitized on social accountability project
Some non-governmental organizations and civil society organizations in the Northern and Upper East regions have been educated on the social accountability platform for local governance performance project for them to contribute to the decentralization concept.
Dr Esther Ofei-Aboagye Director of the Institute of Local Government Studies (ILGS), appealed to NGOs and civil society organizations to contribute to the new concept of the local governance policy intended at deepening local governance through appropriate social accountability to ensure value for money.
Addressing the participants in a day’s experience sharing workshop, she said provisions for social accountability had been provided in the relevant legislation and guidelines for operationalization of the district assembly system.
She said against that background, ILGS had received funding from the European Union to implement an action on “A Social Accountability Platform for Local Governance Performance in Ghana” with the objective to provide a harmonised approach to promoting comprehensive and coherent social accountability at the sub-national level.
Mr. Edward Aboagye, Project Manager for the Social Accountability Platform, said the 1988 local government and decentralization reform operated on four main, inter-related pillars: political, administrative and fiscal decentralization and decentralized planning but confronted with incoherence and contradictions in sectoral approaches to decentralization.
He said the new policy would consider the views of ordinary Ghanaians to clarify the status, roles and relationships between levels of government and the different actors and strengthen their participation and contribution to local governance.
Mr. Aboagye said it would improve the administrative and human resource capacity of the MMDAs and other local government stakeholders to ensure quality service delivery to deepen democratic governance.
He said the second national decentralization action plan is being implemented in a four-year national decentralization action plan based on the policy priorities from August, 2010 to July, 2014.
Source: GNA