The District Chief Executive as part of the local governance strategy to disseminate the government’s policies, programs, and projects to the citizenry began an engagement tour on Wednesday, October 5th, 2022, and brought it to a successful end on Wednesday 12th October 2022 in all 42 communities at the electoral area level with an entourage made up of Heads of department. The engagement is a compliant indicator for the Assembly to satisfy for purposes of the District Assembly Performance Assessment Tool (DPAT) and again enshrined in section 40 of the Local Governance Act, 2016 (Act 936). By so doing, the Assembly is required to organize at least two (2) Town Hall Meetings on the Annual Action Plan and Composite Budget and on the Implementation of the AAP and Composite Budget using Public Financial Management guidelines. Again, it is required of the DCE to hold Community Durbars in at least 20% of the Communities in the District addressing grievances of the communities. The DCE Hon. Godwin Kwame Dadzawa known in social circles as King Jaja on his tour spent time to hearaddress grievances of communities across all development dimensions thus: Economic Development, Social Development, Environment Infrastructure, and Human Settlement, Governance Corruption, and Public Accountability which are anchored by the sustainable development goals to achieve the global slogan of “leaving no one behind”. His visit has contributed a lot to win back the people’s trust in the Assembly and the local governance. He underscored the importance of resource mobilization for local economic development and outlined strategies to curb revenue underperformance due to leakages and loopholes, among other causes for improved financialperformance and sustainability. He opined that a bottom-up approach to resource mobilization would be adopted to leverage collaborations with all stakeholders to mobilize property taxation for local economic development initiatives by engaging and making the people own their development. He encouraged the youth to position themselves to harness the benefits of government initiatives such as the Ghana Enterprise Agency Youth entrepreneurship and employment program and gave his unflinching support to creating an entrepreneurial culture, among the youth.
The engagement was part of the Assembly’s effort to keep citizens involved and informed on the implementation status of programs and projects earmarked for the social and economic improvement in the lives of the citizenry and discussed measures put in place to address bottlenecks identified in the implementation process. The engagement was an opportunity to communicate the project:
Effectiveness – how far projects were achieving their objectives
Efficiency – what was the cost of achieving the objectives and whether or not objectives were been achieved at the lowest cost in terms of, the highest quality and quantity as well as timeliness?
Relevance – are programs and projects providing the appropriate needs of the beneficiary communities
Impact – what are the effects of the project on social, economic, technical, environmental impact on individuals, groups, and the community at large.
