By Iddi Yire
Accra, Oct. 8, GNA – The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) has equipped the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) with a toolkit for developing an integrated approach in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and African Union’s (AU) Agenda 2063.
The toolkit will harmonize the domestication of the SDGs and the AU’s Agenda 2063 to enhance efficiency and reduce transaction costs of reporting, facilitate integration of both agendas in national development plans and track performance on the two agenda.
Professor Bartholomew Armah, Chief of Development Planning Section, ECA, speaking at the end of a four-day workshop in Accra on “Applied Training on Integrated Planning and Reporting Toolkit (IPRT),” said the toolkit had been designed to improve the development planning capacities of AU Member States through the application of the IPRT.
He said the training aims to equip planners and experts of Ghana with the applications of the IPRT.
The training workshop was organised by ECA in collaboration with the NDPC for staff of the Commission and that of the Ministry of Finance.
It was to empower participants to know the functionalities of the IPRT and how to use it in planning and alignment of the 2030 Agenda and Agenda 2063 with national development plans, including the concomitant monitoring of the progress of the two agendas towards their implementation.
Prof Armah said the IPRT process began in Ghana in 2018, and that Ghana was one of the pilot countries; stating that the process and the tool had evolved.
“It has evolved because of the feedback we get continually from our Member States. We are looking forward to making sure that Ghana becomes really a lead pilot country as we unleashed the Integrated National Financing Frameworks (INFF) module of the Tool, because we know that we are in difficult financial times and therefore, ensuring that we have value for money in the use of our resources is critical,” Prof Armah said.
“Although we are a developing country, we can also be pioneers of technology that draws from our unique experiences; because it is challenges that motivate people to design responses. And some of these responses are technical innovations that we are developing here.”
He appealed to the participants to work together to make technological innovation a tool that would be the envy of the developed countries.
Dr Kodjo Esseim Mensah-Abrampa, Director-General, NDPC, lauded the ECA for organising the training workshop critical to the Commission.
He said the commission was beginning just a one-year phase of another medium-term process and that if there were any changes that ought to be made, this was the time.
“We started with the issue of really concerted planning since 1994 with the establishment of the NDPC, but we still think that we have a very long way to go, particularly the linkage between the plans, the budget, the funding, what we do and what we report on,” he said.
“And if you look at all these five stages, you will realize that there are difficulties in terms of the logic. What makes it evening more compounding is the issue of bringing in the SDGs and again aligning to the African Agenda 2063.”
He said ECA coming in gives them about a third or if not half of the problem solved, because there was a tool, which they could apply to this process.
He said the tool would enable the NDPC and the Ministry of Finance to synchronize their dictionaries to make sure that they had the same definitions.
Dr Mensah-Abrampa said with the tool planning and budgeting would become very easy and that implementation also would really fall within the realm of a defined area, which they could actively monitor and report on.
“I am sure with the Tool that ECA has given us we’re really going immediately to finish up whatever is left for us,” Dr Mensah-Abrampa said.
He said this was the crucial time of prioritizing because of lack of resources; adding that the tool would go a long way to help in prioritization.
GNA