National development Plan to be ready by August

The final draft of the long-term National Development Plan (NDP) is expected to be ready by August this year, the Senior Technical Adviser to the Director General of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Mr Ken Owusu, has said.

According to him, the draft would be used to do final consultations with stakeholders to confirm whether it had their inputs and what they wanted the plan to be.

Following that, Mr Owusu told the Daily Graphic that the final draft would be sent to Parliament, adding that 2017 would be used for the preparation process and then implementation would begin in 2018.

Character

The NDP would be national in character and would be the blueprint for progress and sustainable development.

It would be the framework for national accelerated growth and actual reduction in poverty levels among Ghanaians.

It would, among other things, serve as a holistic basis for the assessment of the performance of successive governments.

Reforms

Mr Owusu said on the sidelines of the technical consultation meetings with ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) in Accra that the country needed to think very carefully about reform issues, looking into the future on what kind of institutions it wanted to develop under the development plan.

That, he said, was because after some consultations with the MDAs, it had been realised that some of their policies were conflicting with one another instead of being complementary.

“Some of the things coming up in the consultations have to do with the need to think very carefully about institutional reforms issues going into the future,” he said.

Technical consultations

The meeting, attended by more than 50 MDAs, was to solicit their views and inputs among other things, as part of the stakeholder consultations towards the development of the plan.

The commission, he said, was also looking at institutional coordination going into the future with the development plan, adding “if we do not have institutions well positioned and structured, they become impediments to development instead of being drivers”.

For instance, Mr Owusu said, some institutions needed to be collapsed and others restructured.

He said the month-long technical consultation had been interesting, especially with the inputs coming from representatives of the MDAs.

The technical consultations, he said, had been in two parts: policy review with the MDAs, as well as consultations with identifiable bodies such as faith-based organisations, think tanks and the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI).