By Bernice Bessey & Pix Eric Owiredu
The citizenry’s involvement in governance and development is an important fact for nation-building, as Social Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (SPEFA) has organised a public forum to bring the authorities at the Ga East Municipal Assembly to answer some pertinent issues affecting residents,
SPEFA engaged the residents to educate them on procurement processes, education progresses and challenges, and health issues among others, at Dome, in the Ga East Municipality, last week. Some major developmental problems outlined by the residents were the poor road networks and drains, deplorable markets, lack of public schools in some communities, and proper place to dump refuse.
Charles Abbey, Head of Programmes for Africa Development Programme, implementing partners of SPEFA, indicated that the aim of the forum is to engage citizens in the various assemblies, together with the state officials. The forum, which is held every quarter in a year, enables citizens to understand the content of public financial management and resource, budgeting, procurements, development planning and auditing, so that they will be well informed to ask the necessary questions.
“Apart from that, they also have responsibility to property rates and other levies to the assemblies to the development of the community,” he noted. SPEFA is a component Local Government and Rural Development project, and sponsored by the World Bank, on social accountability, he emphasised. Procurement of services and technical works were the most discussed.
“At the end of the day, people would not sit back and say a road was awarded at Dome and I don’t know the contractor, and how the contract was awarded. If they know what had gone into the procurement of a project, they can also check from authorities why a particular project was delayed starting or completed. We seem to engender that kind of collaboration between citizens and state officials,” he stressed.
The fora, over the years, have served as capacity building for some citizens to learn how to do businesses. “Here there are some traders who now know there are some businesses they can do with the assembly. For example, they can be part of contractors if they sew school uniforms for school children. I remember in one of the meetings that one person said she has applied some of the thing she has learnt to her business, and she is seeing some good results,” Mr. Abbey stated.
Pretty soon, SPEFA would be engaging other citizen groups in about 46 assemblies across the country with a similar project. “People have become more cautious about development process in their assembly,” he noted.