Ghana’s policy actors have expressed their readiness to standardize evidence-use in policy- making to improve development outcomes. Thus, they have called for a stronger collaboration among State institutions and agencies, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and academia to overcome the challenges and constraints in gathering, accessing, and using data in their work.
This comes after a two-day national multi-stakeholder forum organized by the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) on institutionalizing evidence use in policy and practice. The forum, held under the auspices of the Center’s Evidence for Development (E4D) project, sought to review existing initiatives that have adopted the use of evidence and data in policy- making and also to explore opportunities and mechanisms to help in proposing a framework for multi-stakeholder collaboration to advance evidence use in practice.
The event brought together representatives from the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), academics, local government officials, CSOs and the E4D project partners.
The E4D is a pilot project initiated by CDD-Ghana to strengthen the capacity and incentives of policy actors to access and use relevant data and evidence to inform policy decision-making and program implementation to improve social development outcomes at the sub-national level in Ghana.
The project, piloted in three (3) project districts, namely, Bolgatanga East in the Upper East Region, Dormaa East in the Bono Region and Sagnarigu in the Northern Region, has significantly contributed to developing capacities, promoting networks and partnerships, and increasing evidence use in policy and practice.
Awal Mohammed, Senior Research Analyst/Team lead, Social Accountability & SDGs Programming at CDD-Ghana, stressed the need to allow evidence to drive the State’s decisions towards ensuring actual development.
“The idea of continuously talking about the need for evidence to inform the decisions that we make is important. We have to build the kinds of partnerships and coalitions that allows us to have a bigger voice and leverage on each other’s resources, capacities and social capitals to be able to drive these changes and behaviours that we want to see,” he said.
Patience Ampomah, a Planning Analyst at the NDPC, highlighted the progress made by the Commission regarding evidence-based policy formulation.
“There is a lot of progress that has been made with regards to acknowledgement of the institution’s roles and how we can help when it comes to implementation of the plans. We are also gradually whipping up the interest of the citizenry and even at our CSOs levels too,” said Ms Ampomah explained.
The E4D project is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.