Citizen Involvement Essential to Ghana's Development Successes

01 July 2009

By Kathryn McConnell
Staff Writer

Documents & Texts from America.gov

Washington — Committed to a democratic government that involves civil society, Ghana has become "one of the better-performing developing countries in Africa," said the top U.S. aid official in the country.

There are "tremendously important linkages" between good governance and development, Robert Hellyer, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Ghana, told America.gov.

President Obama will visit Ghana's capital, Accra, and a former center of the slave trade, Cape Coast, July 10–11. He is expected to receive an enthusiastic welcome in the country of 23 million people.

Hellyer said one example of Ghana's commitment to its people is the priority attention for education, which receives 30 percent of the government’s budget.

That commitment and support from USAID have resulted in a rapid increase in primary school enrollment — from 73 percent in 1999 to 95 percent in 2008.

Yet challenges in education remain. Low-quality schooling is still a problem, said Bob Davidson, a USAID education officer in Ghana.

In 2004, in cooperation with Ghana's government, USAID launched a six-year program to raise the reading and arithmetic skills of Ghanaian children. The program also focuses on increasing girls’ school attendance, getting members of communities involved in education and preventing HIV/AIDS.

Today, 40 percent of students at USAID-supported schools meet reading competency standards, compared to 17 percent in 2005. The program has been extended through 2013, with a focus on improving education quality and finding ways to provide more educational opportunities for students with special learning and physical needs, said Davidson.

PARTNERSHIPS BOOST GHANA’S DEVELOPMENT

Because Ghana has adopted good governance practices, such as allowing citizens to view their district’s budgets and question local representatives, the United States is deploying more resources to assist the country’s development, Hellyer said. In 2009, estimated U.S. spending will be more than $362 million, more than double the amount spent in 2008.

USAID is working with the Millennium Challenge Corporation to build schools in rural areas and train teachers for those schools. Peace Corps volunteers are teaching in rural schools.

USAID has been a long-term partner with the Ghanaian government in improving the health of Ghanaian citizens — particularly by increasing the quality and use of maternal and child health services, including family planning. Child mortality has dropped sharply in the past decade, although more remains to be done to reduce the number of maternal deaths.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other U.S. agencies have joined USAID in combating malaria and HIV/AIDS.

A USAID program dealing with water and sanitation helps provide mass protection against selected tropical diseases.

In agriculture, USAID is working with the government of Ghana to improve production, increase private-sector investment in agriculture and help Ghana compete in local, regional and international markets.

Through a USAID partnership with Africa’s Ecobank, Ghanaian exporters can learn how to develop business plans and financial statements. The first loan from the bank helped a company to produce handicrafts for sale at gift stores in the United States and Europe. A port services company received a loan to purchase forklifts to move cargo at the port at Tema.

LONG BILATERAL RELATIONSHIP

The United States and Ghana began their development relationship in 1957, initially in higher education exchanges. With the creation of USAID in 1961, the relationship expanded to agriculture and rural development, and later to other areas, including good governance.

A recent example of good governance cooperation between USAID and Ghana is the preparatory work leading up to the December 2008 presidential election in Ghana. Working with citizen groups, USAID trained and deployed thousands of poll observers to oversee the voting. The cooperation also resulted in the training of civil society groups to conduct parallel vote tabulations as checks and balances to official election results. The support helped build Ghanaians’ confidence in the electoral process and thwart fraud.

"This has translated into civic pride in being a role model across the continent," Hellyer said.