NDPC, ICED partner to develop national evidence platform for development planning

The National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) has strengthened policy making through a partnership with the International Centre for Evaluation and Development (ICED) to develop a national digital platform that will consolidate research and evaluation findings to guide Ghana's development agenda.

The collaboration took place at a meeting held in Accra, where officials from both institutions discussed the next phase of work on the Ghana National Evidence and Gap Map, a digital repository designed to make development evidence more accessible for planning, policy formulation and decision-making.

During the meeting, the President and Chief Executive Officer of ICED, Dr David Sarfo Ameyaw, said the organisation had been working closely with the NDPC following a request from the Commission to support the exercise.

He disclosed that ICED and NDPC staff recently held a two-day technical session to catalogue interventions contained in Ghana's national development plan as part of the process of building the evidence platform.

Dr Ameyaw said the exercise covered a broad range of sectors, including social protection and poverty reduction, agriculture and food security, youth employment, education, health service delivery, infrastructure and public works, governance and transparency, as well as environmental sustainability.

The Director-General of NDPC, Dr Audrey Smock Amoah, proposed that the interventions already mapped be reorganised around the five thematic dimensions used in Ghana's national development policy framework.:

According to her, the five thematic dimensions are economic development; social development; environment, infrastructure and spatial development; governance and institutional development; and international relations.

She noted that NDPC is also developing a consolidated national development plan for the long-term, structured around the same five dimensions; thus, aligning the evidence and gap map to this structure would ease its integration into that longer-term framework later.

She noted that issues relating to monitoring and evaluation would fall under the governance dimension, and that NDPC already coordinates the reporting and implementation of Ghana's Sustainable Development Goals, including three completed Voluntary National Reviews and several Voluntary Local Reviews carried out by districts, which could feed into the exercise.

Dr Amoah welcomed the partnership, saying NDPC had been engaging with academic institutions, including the University for Development Studies, on similar efforts to ground policy decisions in evidence rather than instinct, and expressed hope that such collaboration would in time make evidence-based decision-making the norm across government.