Daasebre Oti Boateng calls for healthy economic competition amongst districts

The Paramount Chief of the New Juaben Traditional Area, Daasebre Prof. Oti Boateng, has called on the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development to roll-out an initiative to engender healthy economic development competition amongst districts.

According to him, the district jurisdiction as an economic unit in Ghana is the anchor for rural economic development, but it is only through a well-coordinated competition that high competencies could be built for overall national development.

In the view of Daasebre, Ghana has made significant advances in setting up the right development institutional infrastructure through the district assembly system to propel local economic development.

He observed however that the “fundamental missing link is the absence of a popular performance–based as well as participatory, monitoring and evaluation system to engender healthy development competition amongst the assemblies”.

This he considered as a basic requirement towards attaining a more sustainable and self-reliant development outcomes.

Daasebre Oti Boateng made the call when a team from the Media-Corporate Response Initiative (M-CRI) paid a courtesy call on him to formally brief him on the state of the media-coalition project and to appreciate his acceptance to lead the project as patron.

The M-CRI is a nationwide project initiative to mobilize the media to adopt and implement a globally competitive micro-finance model through local partnership and participatory planning to promote rural economic development.

Daasebre Oti Boateng assured the entire media fraternity that he is committed to “vigorously pursuing this initiative to strengthen the media's role in the decentralization system to support rural economic development”.

Upon his investiture as the Vice-Chancellor of the World Academy of Letters in 2010, Daasebre is mandated by the position to provide leadership for cutting-edge initiatives with greater prospects of lending lessons for addressing particular development challenges globally.

He has identified the media as a potential vehicle to support rural economic development under the Media-Corporate Response Initiative.

The Paramount Chief has therefore challenged stakeholders in local governance to forge a State-Media partnership to roll-out a healthy competition-based district economic model as the kingpin of Ghana's decentralization system.

Story by Kofi Adu Domfeh/Luv Fm/Ghana