UN commends Ghana for prioritising MDGs interventions
Ms Ruby Sandhu-Rojon, UN Resident Coordinator on Tuesday commended Ghana for tracking the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which has helped prioritise development interventions such as child mortality, maternal health and basic sanitation.
She said even though the country is making efforts to accelerate the achievement of MDG five targets, a number of additional challenges remained to be tackled.
Ms Sandhu-Rojon was speaking at the National consultative Meeting on Post 2015 Development Agenda in Accra.
The Stakeholders workshop organised by the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) in collaboration with the UN System in Ghana, is to collate the views of participants on the development agenda for post 2015 and feeding it into the global UN report.
This report would be the basis for inter-governmental negotiations for the Post-2015 global development agenda.
Ms Sandhu-Rojon said findings of the 2012 Aftrica MDG report confirm that the continent steady economic growth in the past few years has led to poverty reduction with positive impact on some of the MDGs.
She said for instance, Africa is on track to achieve the MDG targets of universal primary education, gender parity at all levels of education, lower HIV/AIDS prevalence among 15-24 year olds, increased proportion of the population with access to antiretroviral drugs and increased proportion of seats held by women in national parliament by 2015.
She said while the picture may be brighter for the continent as a whole, it is not so bright for some of the individual countries.
She said many countries including Ghana are lagging in child mortality, maternal health and sanitation targets.
Dr Regina O. Adutwum, Director-General NDPC said in June last year, the NDPC as the apex body for decentralised development planning system partnered the UN Country Team to facilitate the national consultation on the post 2015 development framework.
She said a media campaign to raise public awareness of the initiative started in October last year, which included participation on GTV Breakfast show, radio discussions, and newspaper publication requesting for submissions from the general public and stakeholder groups.
She said one of the cardinal principles for the national consultations was to focus on those who are normally under-represented or marginalised in the decision-making processes.
Dr Adutwum said task teams comprising staff of NDPC and the UN system in Ghana were sent to 15 deprived and marginalised communities to hold focus group discussions with the people, including three slum communities, one each in Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi as well as 12 deprived communities.
She said the measure was to ensure that the voices of people living in deprived and marginalised communities as well as the poor in the society were heard.
She said the inputs gathered from the national consultations would also inform the preparation of a national long-term vision which has already been started by the NDPC.
Source: GNA