Central Government Role in Enabling/Promoting Local Leadership in Ghana

Central government initiatives to promote or enable local leadership include the following:

Collaborating with development partners to create assembly-based, local learning, resource and information centers for community leaders to access information and gain skills for community development. These include the Communication Information Centres under the Land Administration Programme, the Community Learning Centres under the Community-Based Rural Development Programme and similar initiatives under the Social Investment Fund.

Training and other capacity building for local authorities and local leaders (such as traditional authorities and local entrepreneurs) to develop and implement programmes and deliver services. Provision of core development financing to ensure certain minimum levels of development.This has been mainly through the District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) which requires a minimum of 5% of national income being made available to local authorities for development funding. Provision of guidelines for relevant planning and allocation of resources to ensure certain minimum standards of performance and priorities within the national framework.These include the planning guidelines by the NDPC alluded to earlier and the guidelines for the allocation of the Common Fund.

Provision of legal requirements for community consultation and involvement. These include the provisions for community consultation in the local government act; the requirements for public hearing and bottom-up planning in the national planning systems act; and the requirements for community/interest group representation on service structures. These mandatory requirements provide opportunities for community input into district plans as well as channels for feedback from the political and administrative leadership to communities.

Provision of new mechanisms from the centre to keep the citizenry informed. These include the annual people’s assemblies conducted at the national, regional and district levels for public officials to undertake annual accounting and to allow the citizenry to ask pertinent questions.There are also websites to provide information on resource transfers such as on the District Assemblies Common Fund. Increasingly, government has made information on transfers to the districts such as on HIPC resources available to civil society organisations and research institutions. That information has been used by the district HIPC Watch Committees.

Improved soliciting of input from the public: there are advertisements for public memoranda for inputs into the national and district budget processes, legal reviews and invitations to environmental impact assessments. The constraints to electronic and print-based interactions are that non-literate and remote communities would have difficulties in access.

Source: Ofei-Aboagye 2006

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