District Capacity Building Project (DISCAP) - Ghana

Local Governance in northern Ghana: the DISCAP Team

The District Capacity Building Project (DISCAP) was an award-winning seven-year, $11 million initiative to strengthen local governments and water management in northern Ghana. Funded by the Canadian International Development Agency in cooperation with Ghana’s Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Environment (MLGRDE), DISCAP worked in 34 districts across three regions in the north. Jackson and Associates served as executing agency for DISCAP, in association with Gariba Development Associates, a long-time local partner.

DISCAP has its own website: www.discap.org.

Between 2000 and 2007 DISCAP recorded the following achievements, among others:

· engaged with and assisted in the strengthening of some 300 key local-government officials across Ghana’s north;

· animation of joint analysis and action on development issues by the political leadership of the north;

· designed and successfully tested a low-cost, holistic model for optimizing the provision of town water systems, through organization, community development, technical training and mentoring, provision of spare parts, water-quality equipment and other inputs;

· designed and successfully tested a system for recovering institutional debts to local water boards;

· built the capacity of regional planning and coordination of donor, government and district development action;

· strengthened the planning, coordination, leadership and financial management capacities of district administrations;

· established a network of district-based gender equality advocates, which became a model for a national plan for women’s departments within district governments;

· enabled the development and marketing of new management and technical courses by Ghanaian training institutions based on lessons and experience by DISCAP;

· designed and tested regional and district strategies and tools for monitoring poverty reduction, including community scorecards for dialogue between civil society and government;

· assisted with a wide range of innovation-to-policy dialogues, policy writing and training aimed at bringing DISCAP innovations in local governance that were incubated in the north to the national level, especially in the areas of town water, gender and monitoring.

In 2004, Jackson and Associates won the CIDA-Export Development Canada Gender Equality Award for DISCAP’s leading-edge work on district gender desk officers. DISCAP’s town water optimization model has been sought by government officials from South Africa as well as countries in West Africa. The project’s monitoring approach has attracted international attention, as well.

DISCAP Focus On:

Town Water Optimization

The Town Water Optimization Model involved improving the financial, administrative, technical and governance aspects of nine small-town water supply systems in northern Ghana within the DISCAP project, in order to optimize their management, operations and maintenance in a sustainable way. This was achieved by raising district authorities', water boards', operators', and users' awareness, committment, capacity, dialogue and cooperation. In addition, training was provided and inexpensive but key hardware support was supplied. Towns were measured against initial base line indicators after three years. Optimized conditions were arrived at in about 50% of these 18 indicators, toward the end of the project. The main result was that stakeholders were more aware and capable of continuing to take this process further and to continue improving on their own accord.

Gender Equality

Working with 34 District Assemblies in northern Ghana, DISCAP developed a network of Gender Desk Officers within the District Planning and Coordination Units. Trained in gender mainstreaming and supported by regional gender champions, these GDOs advocate for women’s rights and opportunities in the annual and medium-term plans of District governments. At the national level, the project worked with the Ministry of Women’s and Children’s Affairs (MOWAC) to find recurrent funds to permanently pay for GDO salaries; GDOs were on secondment from other departments, such as Education or Social Welfare. MOWAC used the GDO model to design a Women’s Department, to be established in every District administration across Ghana, and has been working with MLGRD to implement this idea. DISCAP provided strategic advice to MOWAC on a regular basis. The project also developed a gender mainstreaming course for local government officials, which will be offered nationally by Ghana’s Institute of Local Government Studies (ILGS).

Decentralized Poverty Monitoring

DISCAP worked with National and Regional stakeholders from 2004 to 2007 to develop a system of decentralized monitoring and evaluation that was built upon the national guidelines published by the National Development Planning Commission in 2003. These guidelines outlined the requirements that the Government had for districts, but they did not deal comprehensively with issues related to operationalization. DISCAP recognized capacity gaps, including the lack of capacity of district officials to collect, analyze and report on data, and the lack of involvement of citizens in the process. Therefore, DISCAP developed "Indicators for Change", an operational guide to decentralized M&E that is a step by step guide for districts, regions, and communities. In addition, nine districts were trained and carried out M&E including a report on the status of poverty as well as Community Score Cards.

Financial Management

The financial management component of DISCAP comprised training and advising in four areas:

1) conceptualizing and utilizing the budgeting process as a planning exercise in which consideration is given to trade-offs within and across sectors, and priorities are established;

2) issues involved with internally generated funds (IGF);

3) transfer of funds from the centre to the District Assemblies (DA); and

4) co-ordination of DA activities with regional/district operations of sector ministries, through the mechanism of the consolidated budget and other means.

The training activities primarily involved courses for elected and appointed officials in the DAs, as well as some participants from the regional planning units and central ministries. DISCAP built links with the Institute of Local Government Studies with an eye to creating a group of trainers and regularizing the training courses within programming of ILGS. Advisory activities had taken the form of input to central government ministries with regional/district responsibilities and through intensive sessions with regional ministers and deputy ministers.

Lead Consultants: Edward Jackson and Sulley Gariba

DISCAP's work has been profiled on CIDA's website: (www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/acdi-cida/acdi-cida.nsf/Eng/B4880C3373C89C42852572290056D579?OpenDocument).