The Oversight Committee of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) in charge of the Kassena Nankana East District on Tuesday validated research findings on Democracy and Good Governance, Economic Governance and Management and Cooperate Governance at Navrongo.
The purpose of the research was to monitor and evaluate activities at the local authority level to identify problems militating against achieving good governance and to find a common goal to address them.
The findings, which were carried out in September 2009, revealed that in terms of corruption the Police Service ranked first in the area as the most corrupt institution, followed by the Ghana Education Service and the Ghana
Health Service.
On access to justice, about 55 percent of the respondents agreed that there was improvement in accessing justice but were of the view that most
judicial decisions were unfairly passed.
The finding also revealed that majority of people now had the ability to express themselves freely as compared to the past years, but more men had the opportunities to do so than women.
On the educational front 67 per cent agreed that there had been improvement in education but 51 per cent indicated that the delivering of
quality education was very low.
According to the findings, there had been some level of improvement in terms of security in communities especially with regards to armed robbery and also there had been improvement in access to electricity.
The Executive Secretary of the Governing Council of the National African Peer Review Mechanism, Dr Francis Appiah, said Ghana was a good example for other African countries to emulate in terms of development and good
governance.
This is as a result of adherence to the APRM and Ghana has over taken other countries which started the programme before it.
Ms Cornelia Amaoh, the Public Affairs Officer of the Governing Council of APRM , said 20 oversight committees had been formed by the Council in 20 districts to periodically monitor and evaluate the activities of the
decentralized system to ensure that they lived up to expectation by satisfying the needs of the people properly.
She said it would also help the communities to participate actively and
contribute to development of their areas.
Ms Amoah said after the validations of all the 20 district oversight committees' activities this year, there would be a national validation
workshop in Accra where all ideas of the APRM would be fashioned and given to the president to be presented at the African Union Summit.
The District Chief Executive of the Kassena-Nankan East, Mr. Emmanuel Andema, commended the ARRM Secretariat and said it would help the assembly in planning and executing its projects properly.
He pledged that his outfit would continue to support the activities of the APRM Programme to achieve its overall objectives. He gave out 500 Ghana cedis on behalf of the Assembly to support the activities of the APRM.