African Center for Parliamentary Affairs (ACEPA) and the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has trained staff of the research department and committee clerks of Parliament of Ghana on data sources for sustainable development goals monitoring.
The data for accountability project, jointly implemented by ACEPA, GSS and INASP with funding from the Hewlett Foundation aims to support Parliament improve quality of life in Ghana through using data to oversee progress towards the SDGs and other national and international development frameworks.
The Senior Governance Advisor at ACEPA, Issifu Lampo, who spoke to Citi News after the workshop was highly impressed that targets have been achieved.
“The main objective of this particular workshop is to first of all foster the relationship between GSS and Parliament. Secondly, to use GSS expertise to enhance the work of Parliament in some specific areas. The parliamentary staff here working in various department have access to critical data that Parliament needs with regard to the SDGs and other areas that CPI and other areas that are designated for their work.”
“It’s not enough for you to just receive knowledge from capacity enhancement or building, but the critical thing is how to apply the knowledge in your work. So we expect that the staff who came here for this particular workshop are able to apply this knowledge in various practical terms.”
Dr Abraham Zechariah, a Senior Research Officer at the research department of Parliament indicated that the staff will now have access to prompt data to enhance the work of parliamentarians to make data-backed decisions.
“For us in the research department, our duty and role is to provide data and present it in a manner that Members of Parliament can use it to do the work that they do. And over the years, we have been having challenges with access to data not because the data do not exist but because we actually don’t have a collaboration with the data-producing institutions that can always provide us with the details on time, it made our work very difficult. So this project has actually come to bridge that gap. It is linking us closer to the data-producing institutions,” he said.