NDPC eyes donor aid to fund projects

The Director General of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Dr. Nii Moi Thompson, has reiterated that the Commission will continue to rely on donors for funding its projects, logistics and activities -- including the 40-year development plan.

Central government, through the Ministry of Finance, is expected to inject capital to kick-start some of the projects and provide logistics for operations of the long-term development plan; however, funds are yet to be made available to kick-start major projects.

“We have met with the Minister of Finance once and told him that we need more than has been allocated to us. He has promised to look into it and see how that can be done. But in the meantime we need to proceed, and the public expects a lot from us,” he told Parliament.

“For now we have nowhere to turn but to donors, as the case may be. We are not very proud about it, but this is a national exercise that we should own and buy into. However, be that as it may, we have to rely on donor support in the short-term. Some of them have been willing to help; the drone we have acquired was funded by UNDP. We are not very proud, but that is where the money is coming from,” he said.

Dr. Nii Moi Thompson, who said this last week when he met the lawmakers during a committee meeting to brief them on the progress made so far, also said the Commission is still working on the technical details of how to finance development of the country as envisaged in the proposed 40-year plan.

He said apart from Public-Private Partnerships, resources from the Ghana Infrastructural Investment Fund and other sources, Municipal Funding will also be considered; and the Commission expects a Municipal Finance Authority bill to be tabled before Parliament for consideration.

This, he noted, will facilitate the Plan’s implementation at the local level.

The NDPC has completed the first phase of the process for developing the envisioned 40-year National Development Plan.

Dr. Nii Moi Thompson described the plan as an indicative plan that will give government an indication of how the country should be.

With regard to energy, he said there should be proper and clear policies to resolve the present energy crisis, and added that the policy should ensure such crises do not occur again.

He also advocated the need to develop a labour information system, to ensure that governments can be measured on the number of jobs they create on net basis.

“Government can say that it has created 5,000 jobs, but at the same time the economy can lose 10,000 jobs; so on the net basis, the economy has actually lost 5,000 jobs. A labour information system will help us to measure this,” he said.

He indicated that there would be a national infrastructure plan which would be the backbone of the plan and a spatial development framework to transform where people live and work and added that there would be an Accra city region and Kumasi city region and urban clusters, with railway lines and freeways linking the towns and cities.

Under the plan, he said communities such as slums would be gotten rid of because the infrastructural plan would eliminate such settlements.

With the first phase of the process of developing the 40-year National Development Plan completed, the next phase is the technical consultation -- which will refine goals, set high level targets and measure goals among others.