Public sector reforms to focus on coordination, ICT, skills training — Minister

Better coordination, ICT infrastructure and proper placement of skilled personnel to be implemented to reform the public sector, the Minister of State in-charge of Public Sector Reforms, Lydia Lamisi Akanvariba, has said.

“We want to have all the public sector or public services coordinated.

We realise that public services is not effective and efficient.

That is one of the challenges,” she said.

Ms Akanvariba

“We have the skilled workforce, some of them are not placed at the right place for them to work, the right positions. We want to have a coordinated and inclusive government services,” she added.

The minister was speaking at a national stakeholder consultation on the National Public Sector Reform Strategy II which was organised by the Public Sector Reform Secretariat (PSRS) in Accra yesterday.

Ms Akanvariba also said that a comprehensive gender strategy would be implemented across metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) as part of the reforms, as well as the establishment of a one-stop shop for government services, where citizens could access all public services in one location.

He also said that public sector reforms must go beyond partisanship, stressing that most people working in the public sector were technical staff and not politicians,” she said.

The minister said after the current engagement, stakeholders and policy thinkers would be consulted before finalising the document for Cabinet approval. 

NPSRS II

The Director of Policy Planning, Budget, Monitoring and Evaluation at PSRS, Joseph Abbey, said the second phase of the NPSRS was being developed to enhance public service delivery across the entire public sector.

He said the NPSRS II was a follow-up to NPSRS I, which gave birth to the Public Sector Reform Project (PSRP) with funding from the World Bank.

Mr Abbey explained that while the first phase targeted only 13 implementing institutions, including the Births and Deaths Registry, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) and the Passport Office, the new strategy would be broader.

Mr Abbey further explained that NPSRS II would maintain the pillars of the first phase, with an additional pillar focused on securing predictable and sustainable funding for future public sector reforms.

He said the review under NPSRS II focused heavily on digitalisation to replace manual platforms with digital processes.

On funding, Mr Abbey said signals from the Minister of Finance indicated a push to source local resources for implementation of activities to ensure that the document was ready for integration into the upcoming 2027 national budget.

He said the strategy was expected to be ready by June for dissemination to public sector organisations for inclusion in the 2027 budget.

On implementation timelines, Mr Abbey said the interventions listed were not one-off, and that the strategy would target a five-year period, from 2027 to 2031, but could be scaled down to four years, ending in 2030.