The Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) has unveiled the Ghana Cities Monitor 2023 Report at a day’s public engagement in Tamale in the Northern Region.
The research was conducted with support from the Hewlett Foundation to provide a comprehensive, reliable and timely citizen experiential data on a wide range of services and infrastructure that affect the quality of life of the people within urban cities in the country.
The maiden edition of the exercise was carried out in the Tamale Metropolis, Kumasi and Greater Accra and 20 municipalities across.
Sharing more insight into the exercise on the sidelines of the public forum, a Research Analysts at CDD, Mr. Gildfred Boateng Asiamah, in an interview said the cities are increasingly important in the development conversations of the country and that this effort is geared towards complementing the policy discussions and advocacy in Ghana on how to improve the quality of life of people living in the cities.
“So the work we decided to do, basically, was to go through the various programmes and interventions that the government is doing including some of the assessment frameworks like DPAD, National Urban Agenda and see whether we really have what it takes to measure how well these programs are doing in promoting the quality of life in the urban space” he explained.
He emphasized that the rationale was to have a sense of the quality of life of people living in these urban spaces and what are the [potentials] of these cities to engender social and economic transformation.
Mr. Asiamah however lamented that the marks scored by the cities in most of the indicators were very low pointing to the fact that the quality of life in these urban centers where people are migrating to for greener pastures are not encouraging to give them the quality of life that they deserve.
“Again, if you look at the whole index, we also saw some disparities between cities in the South and cities in the North. So all the programmes and the interventions put in place over the years, how has it changed the narrative; we still see that gap over there and if we don’t take care, we would still see the movement of people from the north to the south even when the systems to host are not better for them,” he stressed.
Way Forward
The Research Analyst said the country must begin to interrogate how existing policies are being implemented and its impact on the livelihood of the people and not necessarily change the whole architecture.
He further expressed optimism that these issues would reflect in subsequent interventions and the ongoing review of the national urban policy framework.
The CDD Ghana Research Analyst therefore called on the media to interrogate data available and hold those in authority accountable.
SDGs
Taking into consideration the citizens’ perspectives, the CDD Ghana Research Analyst said Ghana may not be able to achieve the UN sustainable development goals before 2030.
“Some may say we still have years ahead of us, so let’s see how best as a nation we forged forward, rectify some of these challenges [we must admit there are challenges] but if you look at the disaster feedback from citizens, handling prevalence of disaster, it’s not encouraging, so I think should be how do we improve we have now so that in the next few years, we would see some changes and people would get to know we’re moving towards total achievement of our SDGs” he posited.
Meanwhile, Chairman of the occasion, Mr. Alhassan Ziblim Al-Hassan, a former Coordinating Director (rtd) for Sagnarigu Municipal Assembly in his closing remarks empathized with the assemblies.
He said the District Assembly Common Fund is woefully inadequate for the assemblies to provide the requisite quality of service to improve the socioeconomic livelihood of the people.
He stated that a large proportion of the national resources are in the hands of policy-making institutions such as the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) and not the MMDAs who are the implementers of state policies and programmes.
“…The other issue is about financing, financing of public services. The Common Fund is by far not the panacea and not everybody knows that it is under certain percentage – the law says not less 5% but somehow we managed to put around 7% but practically that amount doesn’t even come to the assemblies.
“But, the over 92% of the resources are with those who are not implementing [the Ministries, Departments and Agencies], policy making bodies are taking a chunk of the money and so we need to look at the way the assemblies are financed,” he suggested.
