The excluded groups that took part in the training held at Walewale included women, the youth, persons with disability, Fulani member groups among others.

They were drawn from the West Mamprusi and Gusheigu Municipalities of the Northern Region.

About 80 leaders of excluded groups took part in the training.

The training formed part of the Enhancing Social Inclusion in Local Governance (ESILG) project being implemented by RAINS with funding from STAR-Ghana.

The project seeks to build the capacity of the excluded groups, facilitate their participation in local governance activities, promote social accountability and movement building.

The project, whose target is to engage about 200 excluded groups within a period of one year, complements the already existing interventions that RAINS has been implementing in the two municipalities.

Madam Wedadu Sayibu, Programme Manager of RAINS, said it is to help create a platform to train and empower leaders of the excluded groups to demand and hold duty bearers accountable.

Madam Sayibu said the project seeks to ensure equality in decision-making by organizing a series of engagement such as interface meetings between the excluded groups and their district assemblies so as to enable them understand how the decentralized system operates as well as ensure that their voices were included in the Medium Term Development Planning at the Municipal level.

She said under the project, RAINS would also organize inter-community durbars to review the progress of the project in the targeted groups at the various communities to help ensure its effective implementation.

Madam Sayibu urged participants to make it a responsibility to enlighten and share what they had learned at the training with their members in their various communities to ensure that their rights and concerns could be heard and included in activities concerning the communities’ development.

Mr Mohammed Kamel Damma, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer at RAINS, who made a presentation at the training, advised participants to ensure that they identified their most pressing needs and follow the laid down rules and regulations to ensure that duty bearers addressed them amicably.

He urged them to scrutinize their community problems before taking any action to demand solution to them to promote socio-economic development in their communities.

Participants lauded the training as it enlightened them on some of their rights and responsibilities, acknowledging the fact that they faced a lot of challenges in their communities but lacked knowledge on how to push them to policy makers for solutions.

They also acknowledged that there was poor communication between them and their duty bearers leading to poor decision-making.