Mr Osei Yaw Owusu Sekyere, Zonal Representative of the Local Governance Network (LOGNet) for the Western and Central regions, on Monday called on civil society and community based organizations to support Metropolitan, Municipal and District assemblies to implement the decentralization programme.
He made the call at a two-day knowledge sharing and capacity building workshop sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for members of LOGNet in the Western and Central regions at Takoradi.
Mr Sekyere said the support could be financial assistance to the assemblies to enable them to reach down to communities and monitoring of the planning process of the assemblies to ensure that they involve the communities in their planning and development activities.
He said civil society and community based organizations should also ensure that communities participate in local governance by demanding to be involved.
Mr Sekyere said the organizations should come out with concrete ideas that help to establish an acceptable local government system that would facilitate development.
Mr Douglas Quartey, acting National Coordinator of the LOGNet, said similar workshops had been held at Tamale and Kumasi and the next one would be held in Accra.
Mr Quartey said given the fact that some gains had been made in Ghana's decentralization process, it was imperative that the process is deepened to involve citizens in decision making in order to hold duty bearers accountable.
He said about two decades of implementation of the current decentralization policy, it was important that the review process would factor in the concerns of ordinary citizens so as to generate support and ownership needed for successful implementation.
Mr Quartey said, "Due partly to some ambiguities in the policy framework and partly because decentralization was conceived and implemented without the intent of fully relinquishing power from the centre, expected
outcomes such as the participation of citizens and the improvement in accountability relations between local officials and other duty bearers to
citizens in the districts have been negligible".
He said as the nation takes the giant step of reforming the process, it was important that the ordinary citizen who is expected to be the major beneficiary is made aware of what is going on in order to create a sense of local ownership and inclusiveness which are vital elements in entrenching good local governance.