Gov’t outdoors website to track projects

The Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has outdoored a website designed to capture and make easily accessible, data on all of the Akufo-Addo government’s infrastructure projects since it assumed office in January 2017.

The website, www.deliverytracker.gov.gh, has been populated with data sourced from the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), and Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs), and provides information on the status of roads, agriculture, industry, sports, housing, airport, sea defence, fish landing sites, markets, security and digital infrastructure.

The Vice President, who unveiled the website in Accra on Tuesday, August 18, 2020 during a virtual Townhall meeting showcasing the NPP's infrastructure record, said the centralized portal will enable all Ghanaians, researchers, CSOs, and interested persons have access to and interrogate the data.

The Townhall meeting formed part of a Results Fair organised by the Ministry of Monitoring and Evaluation in collaboration with the Ministry of Information.

“The infrastructure data can be obtained by sector (education, health, etc.) by region or by district. As the name implies, “delivery tracker” is a portal where you can track the status of delivery of government promises and also infrastructure projects. It will enhance transparency and accountability in our governance. It will also enable government to monitor all infrastructure projects to ensure that uncompleted projects are prioritized in the process of capital budgeting,” Dr Bawumia explained.

“The portal will be regularly updated. As far as we know, Ghana is the only country in Africa that has implemented this publicly accessible delivery tracker for its infrastructure projects.

“I would like to note that we have not applied any standardized units for counting projects. For example, you may have a project that constructs 120 units of apartments and another project that constructs 25 units of apartments. They will be counted as two projects in the database. We are focusing on the description of the projects, their details and locations so that we can monitor.”

To make the data even more user-friendly, “Pictures and digital addresses are being added for each project on the portal,” the Vice President noted.

Commenting on claims that the Akufo-Addo government had nothing to show for its almost four-year term, Vice President Bawumia declared: “Our opponents are welcome to show us what they accomplished by way of infrastructure initiated in their first term in office. This is because virtually all the key projects they like to point to were completed in their second term of office. We are however happy to compare our three and a half year record with their 8 year record. The data will show that the infrastructure we have provided in many districts over just three and a half years surpasses what they provided in 8 years. We have done more while actually spending less as a percentage of GDP because of value for money.

“Also, contrary to the propaganda, the evidence is that we have also completed or working to complete many projects that our government inherited. We have also put in place a solid base of digital infrastructure to propel the digital economy in Ghana.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I will like to note that we are not just building infrastructure, we are building a nation. We are building all this infrastructure while staying committed to our social contract to providing free senior high school education, creating jobs, transforming agriculture, industrializing the economy, sustaining the national health insurance scheme, digitizing the economy, ensuring the public safety of Ghanaians, and keeping the lights on. We still have much more to do.

“The future is bright if we stay the course. That is why we are asking the good people of Ghana to give Nana Akufo-Addo and the NPP “four more to do more for you.”