Hajia Alima Mahama, Local Government Minister
Hajia Alima Mahama, Local Government Minister

Upper Manya District lauded for good governance practices

The Upper Manya Krobo District Assembly has been lauded for its good governance practices.

The Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) and STAR-Ghana made the commendation at an engagement with stakeholders in the district in the Eastern Region, as part of a district level engagement on systematic barriers and policy options for improving governance and service delivery at the sub-national level.

The programme, which was on the theme; “Systematic barriers and policy options for improving governance and service delivery at sub-national level’’ was to enhance public official responsiveness to service delivery at the sub-national level.

The Research Analyst for CDD-Ghana, Mavis Zupork Dome, in her presentation at a day’s programme at Asesewa said in 2018, the District Assemblies Performance Tool (DAPT) assessment was conducted to evaluate the performance of the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) in their compliance with the existing, legal, regulatory and policy framework. She said based on the DAPT assessment, the Upper Manya Krobo was one of the districts that fulfilled the minimum conditions for the allocation of District Development Fund (DDF).

Conditions

The CDD-Ghana officer said for the Upper Manya Krobo District to have met minimum requirement meant it fulfilled a number of conditions. They included assembly meetings, meetings with sub-committee, a composite budget based on AAP, a work plan by departments, an approved budget, an annual account, no adverse audit, prompt responsiveness to recommendations of external management letters, a procurement plan based on PPA, submitted progress report and involvement of key stakeholders in plan implementation among others.

She said the report indicated that the Upper Manya Krobo District scored an average of 94 per cent on the DDF performance measure which was, however, below the regional average of 97 per cent.

‘’Taking into consideration Upper Manya Krobo on each of the performance measure, it is evident that the requirement of each indicator, the district has perfect scores in management, coordination, monitoring and evaluation, planning and budgeting, procurement, accountability, transparency, social inclusion and service delivery, environment and climate change, capacity building, sanitation and local economic development’’, the CDD officer added.

She, however, indicated that education, sanitation, water and state of service delivery was low in the district which meant that less people accessed such services and called for national and district level actions to improve the delivering of service, adding that it was seriously a worrying trend.

She also called on citizens of the district, as well as all duty bearers to be proactive in areas where the district was lacking saying ‘’it calls for government to rethink in resource allocation the MMDAs appropriately.

The District Chief Executive (DCE) for the area, Mr Felix Nartey Odjao, who chaired the function, said service delivery was a core mandate of the district assembly and its agencies, however, there were a number of challenges and barriers that existed.

He said the district league table had brought to the fore some of the challenges and the Upper Manya Krobo District Assembly continued to find ways of addressing those challenges in order to improve service delivery. He explained that in education, for instance, the district moved from 21 per cent in 2015, 30 per cent in 2016 and 37 per cent in 2017. In health, the performance moved from 35 per cent in 2015, to 38 per cent in 2016 and 62.3 per cent in 2017.

Mr Odjao indicated that the general ranking had also improved from 44.6 in 2015 to 54.9 per cent in 2017. He, however, accepted that there was more room for improvement which required active participation of all stakeholders.

“I, therefore urge all traditional authorities, heads of departments, civil society groups, and all other organisations to assist the assembly to ensure responsible and responsive delivery’’, Mr Odjao stressed.

The Presiding Member of the assembly, Mr Eric Tettey, remarked that the decentralised concept is a good tool, but the onus lay on the citizens to promote it to succeed.

He said the citizens were aware of decentralisation but just that they did not want to get involved either because of lack of education or attitude of duty bearers and called for continuous engagement of citizens and the need for the duty bearers to also live up to expectation in the performance of their legitimate duties.

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