Two Organisations holds dialogue with public officials

Daily Graphic Saturday, November 24, 2007 Page 23

Story: Benjamin Xornam Glover, Garu

THE Institute of Democratic Governance (IDEG) in collaboration with IBIS, a non-governmental organization has convened a dialogue between citizens and their public officials as part of the Governance Issues Forum (GIF) in three districts of the Upper East Region.
The forum which was on the theme, ”Strengthening Civic Participation, Gender Mainstreaming and Public Accountability in Local Governance was aimed at strengthening and enhancing civic participation, women involvement and public accountability in local governance.
The first phase of the GIF programme was held between the years 2005 and 2006 and involved 26 districts in 7 of the 10 regions of the country.
They included four Popular Participation in Local Governance (PPLG) districts in the North.
The recent dialogues held in the Garu-Tempane, Bawku Municipality and Bawku West Districts brought citizens and their local authorities together, to build consensus on the allocation of district resources to issues of priority such as youth unemployment and basic social service delivery.
According to the Head of Training and Interface Unit of IDEG, Dr. Lee Tlou, Ghana's decentralization process was initiated with the aim of fostering popular participation in Governance, particularly at the local level.
She, however, stated that was a persisting perception of a lack of local ownership which has been attributed to low levels of civil society engagement in the planning and implementation process.
“It's against this backdrop that IDEG initiated the GIF program in 2004 which encompasses a number of strategies including public deliberation and skills training around the country”, she said.
Dr Lee noted that certain challenges in the system, including a weak institutional framework and a lack of an effective monitoring and evaluation framework, resulted in the inability of the GIF networks to effectively track and monitor the progress of district programs aimed at solving these identified social and economic problems.
She said IDEG has recorded some successes so far with the GIF program. They include the improvement of relations between state and non-state actors, the empowerment of citizens to proactively engage in the policy-making process, the decision for some GIF network members to contest district assembly elections decisions arrived at as a result of confidence gained through the program.
Presenting a position paper on basic social service delivery in the Gar-Tempane District, a member of GIFNET, Mr. Edward Daramani said though the assembly has done tremendously well, much more remains to be done to improve the lives o f the people.