The Local Governance Scholar called on practitioners to present themselves as ethical role-models before the people with whom they interacted.

Professor Ahwoi was speaking at the 2nd Biennial Professor Samuel Nunoo Woode’s Memorial Lecture on the theme, “Building Capacity for Professionalism and Ethical Conduct in Ghana’s Local Governance System” in Accra.

The Institute of Local Government Studies (ILGS) working together with the family of the late Prof. S.N Woode has decided to institutionalise the “S. N. Woode Biennial Memorial Lecture” to preserve the legacies and service excellence of the Founding Director of the ILGS.

The maiden lecture was held on July 21, 2023 to coincide with the 20th Anniversary of the promulgation of the ILGS Act, 2003 (Act 647), and to fashion out solutions for the betterment of society through the renewal of collective ethical commitments in public life.

Prof. Ahwoi said there was the need to introduce capacity-building “training of trainers” programmes into local government training.
He said the local government space was so vast that the ILGS could not be the sole training to be relied on to do all the requisite training at a central location, adding that, “more trainers, the better training.”

Prof. Ahwoi advocated the decentralisation or regionalisation of training, recalling how Ghana once received UNDP support to establish 10 Regional Mobile Planning Teams that built district-level capacity in decentralised planning.

He suggested a similar “Regional Mobile Capacity-Building Team” model could be developed to promote professionalism and ethicality in today’s local government structures.
He underscored that ethicality and ethics must be made a mandatory component of all training programmes, not an optional add-on, emphasising that capacity-building for ethical conduct should cover all actors in the local governance space.

Prof. Ahwoi recommended that staff performance monitoring and evaluation must include compliance with professional and ethical standards as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI).

He said if all these were to work, then there must be a local government-specific Code of Conduct and Ethics for all local government practitioners to guide practitioners and enforce uniform standards of behaviour across the sector.

“The various organisations within the local government sector including the National Association of Local Authorities of Ghana (NALAG) must all be roped into the campaign to ensure professionalism and ethicality within the sector,” he added.
He said ethics, or ethicality for that matter, in governance straddled the terrains of honesty, humility, integrity and decency.

Prof. Ahwoi said ethical principles required that you put the interest of the people, especially the middle to lower rungs of the organisation, above your personal interest.
He said the ILGS, despite the numerous challenges it faced, it had succeeded in delivering on its mandate which covered the arrangement of courses, workshops, seminars and conferences for persons engaged in areas of local government.

Prof Ahwoi said the Institute delivered on the prescription of the qualification of persons eligible for training at the Institute, undertaken and promoted research in local government and developed training materials for members of the Regional Coordinating Councils, District Assemblies, and other local government units.