Ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) that have failed to submit their plan of activities and interventions to the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) will not be allocated any budget henceforth.
The Director-General of the NDPC, Dr Kodjo Mensah-Abrampa, issued the “no development plan, no budget” directive at a high-level stakeholders workshop on statistical data collection and management in Accra last Thursday.
The directive follows the failure of 12 out of the 46 MDAs to present their development plans, detailing projects and interventions to the NDPC as required by law.
Although he did not provide the names of the defaulting MDAs “for administrative reasons”, he said the report had been forwarded to the Office of the Chief of Staff for action.
Dr Mensah-Abrampa said the NDPC was clothed with the mandate to approve MDAs’ development plans before a budget was allocated.
“If you do not have an approved development plan which brings together all the institutions needed to execute a project, you cannot implement it; if you do not have this plan, which the NDPC has been authorised to approve under the Constitution, you cannot have a budget,” he stressed.
Non-compliance
He said the NDPC had notified all MDAs that it was ready to support them to put together development plans, “so if they are not able to organise their problems and come out with policies and plans to tackle them, they cannot have a budget.”
Dr Mensah-Abrampa added that some of the 34 MDAs which submitted their plans did so very late, and that would no longer be countenanced.
“Even the Ministry of Finance, which controls the finance, submitted their plan on time; if they are managing the revenues and they have submitted their plan, others must do same,” he said.
Major issues
The workshop was part of the quarterly meetings held for top officials of the MDAs, especially those in charge of policy planning monitoring and evaluation (PPME).
It was meant to strengthen the relationship between all the MDAs in the use of data, joint planning and the implementation of the national programmes.
The workshop was also targeted at strengthening collaboration in data sharing and joint implementation between MDAs and enhance understanding of the spatial coordination and proximity analysis.
Again, it would lead to improved analytical capacity of institutional leaders to foster organisational learning and use statistical data as incontrovertible evidence for making key policy decisions.
The participants discussed how the MDAs could maximise resources by harmonising their activities and processes.
Timely workshop
The Government Statistician, Prof. Samuel Kobina Anim, said the workshop was important as it would help the MDAs to understand the relationship between managing data and effective coordination.
He said it was important for officials of the MDAs to know the pillars of data management from production, transforming data into statistics and increasing the returns on investment in data.
He noted that increasing the returns on investment in data required sharing integration of the data.
Prof. Anim also stressed the need for MDAs to promote interoperability by building systems to facilitate the use of data.
Background
In line with the mandate of ensuring a well-coordinated and effective decentralised planning system, the NDPC organised a meeting involving all the MDAs on January 31, 2023.
The meeting, which aimed at strengthening coordination among the MDAs, identified some fundamental issues confronting the smooth coordination and implementation of development programmes.
Statistical data collection and management for development coordination; improving capacity of MDAs in administrative data collection and management; uncoordinated implementation of programmes and projects within sectoral dimensions; joint resource mobilisation; governance and institutional issues, and policy conflicts were some of the issues that were identified.
SOURCE: GraphicOnline
