GII Revives Media Momentum On Open Governance

The Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII) has taken steps to increase media involvement in promoting efforts that will also increase transparency and accountability among state institutions in Ghana.

Mrs. Mary Awelana Addah, the Programmes Manager at GII, during her presentation said her outfit is establishing a media Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) group that will specifically hold the commitments of government in order achieve the target of open governance.

According to her, a study conducted on the Open Governance Project (OGP) indicated that despite the several structures put in place to control government behaviour like the Public Financial Management Act, 64.2 percent of the people said there is no control and oversight responsibility whiles 29 percent said there is some sort of control and oversight.

“The laws are there but in practice they are not implemented effectively which is the reason why we are not achieving the best results for the country,” Mrs. Addah posited.

She added that 81.3 percent said there is no transparency, 6.8 percent indicated that there is some sort of transparency in the system while 11.9 percent agreed that there is partial transparency in all government processes.

Mrs. Addah attributed this to the fact that most of the commitments made by government passes through Parliamentary procedures however, the processes involved are not very transparent in the sense that the media has failed to publish the issues to the citizens.

She said this at a workshop to engage the media on open governance under the theme, “The Role of the Media in Promoting Open Governance in Ghana” in Accra.

Mrs. Mary Awelana Addah emphasized that citizen participation in government processes scored 29 percent while 68.1 percent majority said there is no participation.

She however indicated that steps were taken to establish citizen groups such as Social Auditing Clubs who were given the task to monitor and supervise service delivery at the district level that will increase momentum for transparency and accountability.

Mr. Pethuel Danyo, Deputy Director of Public Sector Reform Secretariat (PSRS), said, open governance is the panacea to comprehensive development which requires the effort of the media as a partner in ensuring that it works.

According to him, Open Governance Partnership (OGP) is a global initiative aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

He added that Ghana which became a member of OGP in September 2011 formed a taskforce to take note of all OGP required practices until an OGP Action Plan was established in 2012 and ended in 2014.

Mr. Danyo emphasized that the OGP Action Plan captured the commitments and four thematic areas such as transparency, citizen’s participation, accountability and, technology and innovation.

According to him, the next phase of the OGP which is currently underway with collation of views from citizens and discussants, the OGP commitments will be structured around five grand challenges such as improving public services, increase public integrity, more effectively managing public resources and increasing corporate accountability.

He said, however, funding remains a challenge for the implementation of the OGP Action Plan.

“Unclear reporting duties or processes to capture progress made by responsible MDAS and legal challenges on commitment 3.3 “accountability”, specifically on verification of assets declaration,” Mr. Danyo intimated.

He urged the media to religiously and continually push much more for open governance participation particularly to those in the deprived communities.