The National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) has started a capacity-building programme for Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies ( MMDAs) on how they can better operationalise the national COVID-19 green economic recovery agenda.

In line with that, the NDPC has developed an Integrated Assembly Financing Framework (IAFF), as a guideline for the MMDAs.

The green economic recovery agenda seeks to help all stakeholders of the economy recover from the impact of COVID-19 and build resilience against local and external shocks.

Dissemination workshop

At a capacity building and guidelines dissemination forum in Accra yesterday, the Director-General of the NDPC, Dr Kodjo Esseim Mensah–Abrampa, said the MMDAs economic recovery support journey started as a COVID-19 recovery response project piloted in some selected districts.

He said the NDPC and the Ministry of Finance (MoF) in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) supported selected MMDAs to launch the COVID-19 Recovery Plans and Integrated Assembly Financing Frameworks which informed the current guideline.

He said the NDPC was focused on how it could facilitate and push MMDAs through an aggressive process to start from where they were economically before 2020.

“And in doing that, we realised that we needed to propel the economic activity, because the most affected area was the economy.

In responding to the economy, we realised the need to give it a green dimension so that those things we could adapt to respond to the challenges in climate change, we do it.

Dr Mensah–Abrampa said the forum was, therefore, to share with the stakeholders, the integrated tool which was multi-faceted in dealing with all the economic recovery issues and developed by the NDPC.

He said property tax was a major source of revenue generation in many countries, particularly developed ones which needed to be leveraged on locally.

“This is because it is a progressive tax, progressive in the sense that, it spares the poor people and targets the rich because it targets assets.

But in our country, it has been relegated for so many years”.

He called on the stakeholders to harness and mobilise the resources from their respective localities because it was an existing viable source of revenue into the national kitty.

Support

In a speech read on his behalf, the Greater Accra Regional Minister, Mr Henry Quartey, said the NDPC in partnership with the UNDP continued to strengthen capacities of national stakeholders to facilitate a national recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This support includes improving capacity for effective participation of citizens at the local level as well as improving the local market ecosystem.

"The government is also investing in a vast scale of interventions to stimulate the economy to bounce back in a better and green way," he said.