Ghana’s 261 district assemblies have no dedicated communication units, and it's costing the country

Ghana has 261 Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies spread across its 16 regions, each equipped with departments for planning, finance, works, and several other decentralised functions. But according to the Communications, Project, and Knowledge Management Specialist

Cecil Ato Kwamena Dadzie, there is one critical unit missing from virtually all of them: a dedicated strategic communication department.

In an interview, Dadzie, a 2025 U.S. State Department International Visitor Leadership Programme (IVLP) Fellow with nearly two decades of experience in Ghana’s development sector, described the absence as “a governance failure hiding in plain sight” and called on the Ministry of Local Government, Decentralisation and Rural Development to address what he considers a fundamental gap in the country’s local government architecture.

The communication gap at the district level

The Local Governance Act, 2016 (Act 936) provides for the establishment of a Public Relations and Complaints Committee within every District Assembly, chaired by the Presiding Member.

The committee is mandated to receive complaints against the conduct of members and staff of the Assembly, and is also tasked with educating the public on Assembly activities and promoting transparency and accountability.

But Dadzie argues that this structure is fundamentally inadequate for the communication demands that modern local governance requires. While the committee’s mandate on paper includes public education, he contends that this function is rarely resourced or systematically performed in practice.

“That committee is designed to receive complaints, not to drive proactive

communication. It is reactive by mandate and under-resourced by practice,” he said. “A suggestion box is not a customer service department.”

What is needed, he explained, is a functioning unit staffed by trained communication professionals whose responsibilities would include translating development plans into accessible language for citizens, managing the Assembly’s presence on local radio and social media, coordinating stakeholder engagement for community projects, and handling crisis communication when issues arise.

Citizens left in the dark

Dadzie painted a picture of a widespread disconnect between Assemblies and the citizens they serve, one he attributes directly to the absence of deliberate communication practice.

“Ask any citizen in a typical district what their Assembly is currently working on and the answer will almost certainly be a blank stare or a complaint,” he said. “Not because the Assembly is doing nothing, but because whatever it is doing is invisible to the people it is meant to serve.”

He cited specific patterns that recur across districts: budget allocations made without public explanation, development plans drafted without accessible communication to affected communities, and revenue mobilisation campaigns launched with enforcement but without prior education. When projects stall or contractors default, he noted, the Assembly’s silence allows rumour and public frustration to fill the vacuum.

“Citizens are not apathetic by nature. They disengage because they are not being communicated with. That is a failure of the institution, not the public,” Dadzie said.

Internal communication also affected

The problem, according to Dadzie, is not limited to external communication with the public.

He argued that the absence of a communication function also undermines information flow within Assemblies themselves, affecting coordination between departments and creating bottlenecks between the national government, regional coordinating councils, and the district level.

“Too much falls through the cracks because there is nobody whose job it is to make sure the right information reaches the right people at the right time,” he said. “A strategic communication unit does what communication units do in every effective organisation: it connects the institution to its publics and its publics to the institution.” “The cost of not communicating is already being paid.”

Anticipating the most likely objection, that Assemblies already operate under severe financialconstraints, Dadzie argued that the cost of the communication gap is already being absorbed, but in the form of governance failures rather than budgeted expenditure.

“When citizens do not understand why revenue is being collected, compliance drops. When communities are not consulted about projects, those projects are abandoned or resisted. When Assemblies cannot explain their work, public trust erodes, and political tensions rise,” he said.

“Every one of these costs is a communication cost, and every District Assembly is already paying it. They are just paying it in failure rather than in function.”

Implications for decentralisation

Dadzie situated his argument within the broader context of Ghana’s ongoing decentralisation programme, which has sought since the early 1990s to transfer governance functions and resources from central government to the district level. He contended that without a corresponding transfer of communication capacity, the decentralisation project remains structurally incomplete.

“Ghana’s decentralisation agenda will not be fully realised by transferring functions and resources alone. It requires transferring the capacity to communicate,” he said. “A District Assembly that cannot tell its own story, cannot listen to its citizens, and cannot manage information strategically is an Assembly that is governing in the dark.”

He concluded with a statistic he said should concern every stakeholder in Ghana’s local governance system.

“Two hundred and sixty-one Assemblies, not one dedicated communication unit. That is not a gap. It is a governance failure hiding in plain sight.”