General News of Tuesday, 6 July 2004

Source: GNA

Committee to supervise Information Systems

Accra, July 6, GNA - A Steering Committee to supervise the creation of an information system for monitoring and evaluation of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has been set up.

The nine-member committee chaired by Mr Poku Kyei, Special Assistant to the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, follows the European Union's grant of 28.3 billion cedis to build on the existing capacity of the Centre for Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Services (CERSGIS).

CERSGIS is to build the capacity for five institutions of Government in the use of GIS for monitoring and evaluating the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy implementation projects.

Dr Samuel Nii Noi Ashong, Minister of State for Economic Planning, said the objective of the mapping and monitoring and evaluation system was to provide an accurate picture of the distribution of the development projects and the impact these projects were having on the quality of life of the beneficiary communities.

The key feature of the project is to harmonise and standardise the database of the services and amenities with the implementation of the GPRS. It includes education and health services; clean water supply; sanitation amenities; rural community electricity supply and settlement accessibility and connectivity through feeder roads.

He said CERSGIS with its collaborative agencies would help in auditing development projects and propose new ones.

"This would be done by bringing all the data sets on the social services and amenities into a centralized multipurpose database management system for use by government, NGOs and the private sector for their respective project planning, implementation and evaluation."

Dr Ashong said the mapping would provide an adequate picture of the development situation in the country, the distribution pattern, success or failure situation and the direction where more projects should be located to sustain human development within the communities.

Dr Ashong said the project was expected to support effective exchange and sharing of information by Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs).

Mr Stefan Frowin, Head of the EU Delegation in Ghana, who mooted the idea, said it complements the existing data collection of MDAs Project Evaluation Unit of the Office of the President, NDPC, Ministry of Local Government and the Ghana Statistical Service in their role of collating and disseminating of poverty related information.

He said the EU believed that the three-year project financed through the European Development Fund would improve the use of development resources and contribute directly to the Government's objective of good governance.

Dr Emmanuel Amamoo-Otchere, Executive Director of CERSGIS, said it was their objective to translate all enumerated census data from analogue to digital, adding, " so far the census data of the three Northern Regions have been digitised. 06 July 04