MMDAs advised to explain policies to public
Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies in Ghana have been advised to buy space and time in the media to enable them to properly explain their policies, budget and revenue issues to the public to avoid speculations and misinformation from media practitioners.
Mrs Irene Messiba, Head of Social Accountability Unit (SAU) of the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development (MLGRD) who gave the advice on Thursday said the inability of the MMDAs to take the initiative of educating the public on their activities does not help in providing the public with the needed information about their operations especially the use of public funds.
Mrs Messiba gave the advice in Tema during a day’s sensitization programme on the implementation of the component three of the Local Government Capacity Support Project for staff of the Tema Metropolitan Assembly and other stakeholders.
She urged the media not to only publicize the negative dealings of the MMDAs but also to highlight and support their achievements.
She implored media practitioners who have interest in reporting on the MMDAs to join the Media Network on Social Accountability which is being formed under her outfit.
The network which is a voluntary network of media entities aims at raising public awareness on local government public financial management issues.
Mrs Messiba added that it was her outfit’s objective to increase the number of media entities reporting on public finance management and social accountability issues at the national and local levels, as well as increase the frequency and accuracy of media coverage of the supply and demand side of accountability.
On the implementation of the component three of the Local Government Capacity Support Project, she indicated that that component was based on “Stimulating Demand for Accountable Governance and Service Delivery”.
She stated that the objective of the component was to generate civil society demand for financial information from the MMDAs as well as to foster more effective engagement of civil society with the assemblies on financial issues including budgets and audits.
She added that the component three of the project will be delivered through a tripartite relationship between the state which will be represented by the MMDAs facilitated by the SAU, the civil society and the media.
Miss Fati Lily Soale, Assistant Director I of the MLGRD in a presentation on the overview of the Local Government Capacity Project said the project is a US$ 175.0 million government of Ghana-World Bank initiative targeting 46 MMDAs.
Miss Soale added that the five-year project which is modeled on the Functional Organizational Assessment Tool is aimed at addressing some of the weaknesses of Ghana’s decentralization framework.
The project has four components which are component one; “strengthening the fiscal framework for decentralization, component two; “enhancing decentralized urban service delivery”.
The third component, “Stimulating demand for accountable governance and service delivery”, while the fourth one is on “Institutional and project management support”.
Source: GNA