IBIS Country Director lauds Ghana’s free SHS policy
The Country Director of IBIS, Mr Tijani Ahmed Hamza, has commended the introduction of the free SHS education policy in Ghana, announced by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo last Saturday.
Advertisement
He said the policy fit in well with studies that showed that spending on social sectors such as health, education and social protection, helped to level out inequalities in the country.
He was speaking at a national advocacy workshop on “Fiscal Policies to Tackle Inequality in Ghana,” organised by West Africa Civil Society Forum (WACSOF), an umbrella organisation of civil society organisations in West Africa, mobilising for people-centred fiscal policies.
Objective
WACSOF is partnering OXFAM and IBIS in ensuring that fiscal policies in the subregion are taken to lessen inequality in society and not worsen it.
The two-day workshop was part of the country launch of the draft report on a study by OXFAM-IBIS in Ghana, Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone on Fiscal Policies to Tackle Inequality.
The objective of the seminar and the draft report launch was to mobilise participants, who were drawn from civil society organisations and government agencies, around issues on inequality as a result of fiscal policies.
It is also to firm up discussions around the report in targeted campaigns in countries for fiscal policies that were better tuned to lessening inequality in the countries.
Mr Hamza was of the view that government’s spending on symbolic social ventures with wide-reaching impact on people, was important.
He challenged policy makers to increase spending on education, health and sanitation, which directly impacted on the well-being of Ghanaians.
Opportunities
The Programme Manager of the WACSOF, Mr Sela Emile Kouakou, in his submission was happy for the opportunities provided to share perspectives that would contribute to policy.
He said the WACSOF secretariat was supportive of such effort.
The Director of Operations of the Institute of Democratic Governance (IDEG), Mr Kofi Awity, said the workshop was timely in providing the advocacy tools and materials for redressing inequality in countries.
The report was undertaken within the context of an IMF suggestion in one of its reports in 2016 that “many countries urgently need to reset their policies to reinvigorate growth.”
Thus OXFAM-IBIS initiated the study to ascertain the link between fiscal policy and social inequality in the three West African countries.
The study included field research where OXFAM and IBIS commissioned an assessment of the “progressivity of tax and transfers to understand the equalising impacts”, the in-depth reviews of reports including the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI), the budgetary allocations of the targeted countries to education, health and social protection initiatives and other ECOWAS protocols on democratic governance.
The Ghana story
For Ghana, the report concluded that the tax system was fairly progressive, but emphasised the opportunities for doing better for an expanded spending on the sectors that impacted on human development.
It showed some inequalities in society in spite of seeming growth in certain economic sectors.
The priority recommendations of the report to make the country’s fiscal policy fight inequality better, included making the tax system more progressive and enhancing the tax effort by clamping down on tax exemptions and deductions.
Harmony
The Programme Director of the Democratic Governance in West Africa (DEGOWA) programme of OXFAM-IBIS, Mr Mohammed Mahamud in an interview with the Daily Graphic after the presentation of the report, said the government’s indication to expand the National Identification System (NIS) was one of the definitive ways of realising the tax potential of the country.
He said although not mentioned in the report, the tax potential of the country could be enhanced if the national identification was harmonised to the Tax Identification Number (TIN) of individuals, other identification systems and where an individual lived.
Participants in the workshop included representatives from the Centre for Democratic Governance (CDD-Ghana), SEND Ghana and the West Africa Civil Society Initiative (WACSI).
