SADA moves to implement Master Plan
The Savanna Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) is to set up a Development Coordination Office (DCO) comprising experts in financial engineering and investment promotion to serve as the nerve centre and implementation body of its much touted Master Plan.
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The office will also comprise lawyers, engineers and development economists, among other specialists, who will constitute the technical implementation team of the authority's medium term development plan.
The Chief Executive Officer of SADA, Mr Charles A. Abugre, told the Daily Graphic in Tamale that the DCO was expected to be operational by February, next year, to pave the way for the implementation of game-changer projects contained in the Master Plan.
"As we have been saying, we are not planning for it to sit there for others to come and see. We are actually planning to actively intervene and make sure that these things happen and so the DCO will have a specialist technical team whose mandate will be to ensure that the projects actually see the light of day," he said, after addressing stakeholders from the Tamale Metropolis and Buipe at a meeting in Tamale.
Getting value for money
Mr Abugre said measures were in place to ensure that implementation of the Master Plan, which was expected to spearhead the transformation of the area, would begin in April, this year.
The SADA Master Plan is a 25-year blueprint, with strong emphasis on agriculture, tourism, education and infrastructure, that the authority is hoping to use to transform the Northern Savanna Ecological Zone (NSEZ) from a region of underdevelopment to one that abounds in opportunities for investors and its residents.
The successful establishment of the DCO will, therefore, represent a significant milestone towards the successful implementation of projects that bother on education, agriculture, infrastructural improvement and investment generation.
Already, the CEO said the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC) had seconded two of its experienced staff on investment promotion to the authority to be part of the DCO team, which will comprise experts from Ghana and those from Surbana Jurong, a Singaporean urban planning and designing institution.
"Now, we want to reach out to other government offices for personnel such that rather than SADA recruiting its own staff into this, we will use experienced people from institutions such as the Ghana Institution of Engineers (GhIE) for engineers and agricultural mechanization for experts in agriculture.
This way, we will build the Ghanaian part of the DCO not just by recruiting but by bringing existing ones to work together," he said.
Mr Abugre said the decision to resort to staff secondment from existing state institutions was to ensure that the authority spent less time and resources to get the best brains to constitute the technical implementation team of the Master Plan.
Learning basics
Currently, Surbana Jurong, the state institution that engineered the transformation of Singapore, is guiding SADA to develop the Master Plan.
To help build a competent team Ghanaians to execute the plan, Mr Abugre said SADA had agreed with Surbana Jurong to mentor the local team on the DCO for five years after which they will exit.
Stakeholder meeting
The meeting was a follow-up to an earlier one on September 26, where participants, comprising experts in city designing and planning within the two cities underscored the need for SADA to broaden discussions on the development of city plans, subsets of the Master Plan, to the private sector and individuals.
As a result, the September 28 meeting brought together people from civil society organisations (CSOs), private sector and development institutions in Tamale and Buipe to take their inputs on the two plans being developed for the two cities.
