Ghanaians must own Ghana Beyond Aid — Prof. Ayee
A Professor of Political Science at the University of Ghana, Legon, Professor Joseph Atsu Ayee, has called on Ghanaians to own the Ghana Beyond Aid programme.
He said three years after the programme was launched, Ghanaians had not owned the vision to enable them understand what Ghana Beyond Aid meant and their duties as citizens to trigger the needed attitude for the good of the nation.
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Prof. Ayee, who shared his perspective on the Ghana Beyond Aid in an interview, said the vision was still work in progress because there had been little or no public education on the programme for the citizenry to understand and carry the vision wide.
Communication
He said the communication strategy of the document talked about an annual public forum to review and discuss the various aspects of the vision; ‘‘ but I have not heard of such forum taken place.’’
‘‘Stakeholder engagement had not been effective because of the COVID-19. All attention was focused on the pandemic and even now, COVID-19 has engaged our attention.
‘‘I think the government should take up the challenge to carry the burden of COVID-19 and Ghana Beyond Aid so that both programmes will run simultaneously, else a vision which is a national agenda will become a government agenda and will soon be forgotten,’’ Prof. Ayee emphasised.
He said a collaboration between the Ghana Beyond Aid Secretariat and the Ministry of Information in terms of allocating resources to media houses to serialise the Ghana Beyond Aid Charter and Strategy in local languages would help Ghanaians to know what exactly the vision was about.
With such education, he said, the citizenry would be able to give feedback about the programme because it was a two-way communication strategy.
‘‘I believe some media houses have even forgotten about Ghana Beyond Aid that is why we have not heard of it in the news for some time now,’’ he said.
National vision
Prof. Ayee said the Ghana Beyond Aid programme was a good vision because it was a national affair which brought experts from about 21 institutions to write a position paper which came out with the Charter and Strategy document. ‘‘I was part of the team because at the forum, I led the process to present the Institute of Democratic Governance (IDEG) position.’’
He said the Ghana Beyond Aid document had two key pillars – first, it should be a national agenda and not government agenda and second, the agenda must focused on values, mindset, attitudinal and behavioural change of Ghanaians to enable it create an environment to pursue development.