Public organizations must be responsive to changing environment

Accra, March 19, GNA - Mr Joe D. Issachar, Head of the Civil Service, on Monday called for a new approach to organizing and managing public organizations to make them efficient and responsive to the changing environment.

He also called for the acquisition of the necessary skills and tools to tackle the multi-faceted nature and complexities of public administration.

Mr Issachar was speaking at the opening of a five-day workshop organized by the Head of the Civil Service in collaboration with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) on organizational changes and transition in public administration.

The workshop being attended by 25 participants from the Ministries, Departments and Agencies is under the theme: "Leading Organizational Change and Transition."

Mr Issachar said even though the Ghana Civil Service had gone through a number of reform initiatives since the 1980s geared towards enhancing efficiency and performance of the Service, they did not appear to have achieved much success.

He said the change that the public expected in the Civil Service could not happen by themselves without the essential ingredient of managing the people side of change.

He called for the infusion of new ideas and innovations that would improve and lead to progress and growth in public administration. Mr Issachar commended the Japanese Government for supporting the Civil Service in the Capacity Development Administration Project to address issues of efficiency, high performance and productivity improvement.

He said the workshop marked the commencement of a series of training programmes to be held in Ghana, Singapore and Malaysia where some personnel from the Civil Service would be sent from time to time. Mr Hiroshi Murakami, a Representative of JICA, said the objective of the programme was to prepare the participants for the change and transition ahead.

He urged participants to apply the knowledge acquired during the training workshop to the Ghanaian context.

Mr Shahrill Abdul Jalil of the Civil Service College International of Singapore, who is the resource person for the programme, said the training workshop was to expose the participants to the new concepts in public administration.