CHIEF EXECUTIVES ATTEND SEMINAR IN SUNYANI (PAGE 20)

MUNICIPAL and District Chief Executives from Ashanti, Brong Ahafo and Central regions have attended a day’s orientation seminar on community-based rural development project (CBRDP) at Sunyani.
The seminar was aimed at introducing the participants to the project and also enable them to lead the implementation arrangements in their respective municipal and districts assemblies.
They were taken through the project’s objectives and implementation strategies and also discussed strategies for the way forward.
The $94 million CBRDP, which is about rural poverty reduction and capacity building for effective local government system, is aimed at improving the quality of life of Ghana’s rural communities through increased transfer of technical and financial resources for the development of basic rural infrastructure that could be sustained by the beneficiaries.
The project is sponsored by the World Bank and the government, with the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development (MLGRD) as the implementing agency.
It is one of the tools for achieving the objective of the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy.
At the ceremony, the Deputy Brong Ahafo Regional Minister, Mr Eric Opoku, said since the chief executives had just been appointed as heads of the various assemblies participating in the project, the seminar would equip them with the basic information to enable them to understand the programme.
The seminar, he said, would provide them with the capacity to effectively manage its implementation as an integral part of their respective districts’ overall development programme.
Mr Opoku noted with satisfaction that the project had so far provided school infrastructure, clinics, many boreholes and hand-dug wells and feeder roads to open up communities.
“All these are pro-poor programmes aimed at reducing the poverty levels in our communities and also to further deepen our decentralisation process,” he observed.
Mr Opoku, therefore, expressed his appreciation for the tremendous support that the CBRDP had been providing to meet the development needs of the people in the various communities.
 As a way forward to ensure the success of the programme, he urged the participants to keenly monitor it, stressing, “Let us make monitoring of the project a regular feature of our activities”.