Alhaji Osman Abdel-Rahman, Executive Director of Ghana Developing Communities Association (GDCA) has said the availability of resources is key to any successful decentralisation programme.
He said this at the backdrop of government's inability to meet timelines on the
transfer of five per cent of the national revenue to Metropolitan, Municipal
and District Assemblies (MMDAs) as the District Assemblies' Common Fund
disbursement timelines was required by law.
He said this during a regional dialogue on local revenue generation and
launching of internally generated funds (IGF) compendium in Tamale.
The event, organised by GDCA in collaboration with Northern Regional Tax
Justice Coalition and beneficiary districts of the Empowerment for Life
Programme, was to prepare a compendium of best practices and challenges in the
mobilisation of local revenue.
Alhaji Abdel-Rahman said as a country, the availability of resources was key
for any successful decentralisation process and added that the tenets of local
government system were to raise internal revenue to complement transfers from
central government, which had been fraught with a lot of challenges bedeviling
the processes.
He said due to the challenges, GDCA had engaged in interventions aimed at
helping to increase MMDAs' IGF while reducing revenue leakages.
He talked about the IGF compendium, which was also launched as part of the
event, saying it was developed in support of the desire to increase IGF in the
country’s MMDAs.
Mr Philip Gmabi, Technical Advisor, Policy, and Governance at GDCA, advised
MMDAs to use revenue management software in their revenue generation to address
the challenges.
He called on MMDAs to adopt electronic payment systems to reduce cash payments
to enhance accountability and transparency.
He added that MMDAs should also improve community outreach efforts for citizens
to better understand internal revenue mobilisation and utilisation processes.
Source: GNA