NDPC holds consultation on medium term national development policy

The National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) has organised a Regional medium-term development plan 2022-2025 for members of the Municipal, District Planning, Coordinators, and heads of decentralized departments in the Oti Region.

Mr. Bright Y. Atiase, Deputy Director and Research for National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), said social and political recommendations were made for the revision of existing policies and programmes to formulate comprehensive national development planning strategies and ensure that the strategies which include; consequence policy programmes were effectively carried out.

Mr. Atiase said the process of preparing the medium-term national development planning framework (MTNDPF) 2022-2025, started last year and had involved the review of the performance of the implementation of the MTNDPF for 2018-2021.

He said broad consultations were made especially on technical experts from government Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), civil society organisation (CSOs), and academia, who were organised into cross-section planning groups, and the output from the engagements had been the preparation of a zero draft MTNDPF, 2022-2025.

He said a number of recommendations from a series of National Development Forum, which were organised by NDPC to solicit public opinion on topical development issues were incorporated into the process.

Mr. Atiase said the draft framework was aligned to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), AU Agenda and ECOWAS protocols that Ghana had signed.

The main objective for the regional and sub-regional consultations include creating awareness on the development goals, objectives, and priorities for the country over the next medium-term (2022-2025).

Also to solicit ideas and inputs on development priorities for the next medium-term and it was expected that by the end of the engagement participants would be well informed about policy direction of the country for the medium-term 2022-2025 and ownership created for its implementation.

Mr. Andrews Okumah Nawil, Oti Regional Coordinating Director, said once the policy framework was finalised, the ORCC would be expected to work closely with all MDAs to finalise their respective development plans and subsequently complete the Regional Integrated plan for the area.

He said both the district development plans and regional integrated plans would have to be implemented comprehensively to ensure the achievement of both regional and national development goals and objectives.

The participants were taken through a series of presentations for the two-day workshop by the facilitators from Accra.