The Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) has initiated a project to track the implementation of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government’s flagship program, Infrastructure for Poverty Eradication Program (IPEP).

The “IPEP tracker” is to monitor the implementation of projects promised by the NPP government during the campaign period.

Awal Mohammed, Research Officer with CDD-Ghana, said development initiatives over the years have had extremely poor implementation and management records, therefore, the need for the “IPEP Tracker”.

According to him, one thing CDD-Ghana realized during their research was that most Bureaucrats, Planning Officers, District Coordinating Officers had limited information on ‘IPEP’ initiative.

“We thought that if this is the way we are going to go about it then there is really going to be a problem in terms of how we implement the IPEP and the kinds of impact that we want,” he said.

Mr. Mohammed cautioned that the implementation of IPEP has to be done carefully thus the need for the tracker so we do not repeat the mistakes of Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA)

“Because we have the history of SADA with us and it appears to be a similar process of implementation that we are seeing with IPEP then we have to be very careful so we don’t repeat SADA three, four times which would have been a huge lost for us” he cautioned.

BACKGROUND

Infrastructure for Poverty Eradication Program (IPEP) is a program being implemented by the government to address the problem of poverty in rural areas by expanding and improving on existing infrastructure at the District level to create jobs, accelerate growth and reduce poverty.

The project is being undertaken by CDD-Ghana with funding from the Department for International Development(DFID) under its strengthening Action Against Corruption (STACC) programme

The CDD-Ghana IPEP Tracker project focuses on the assessment and monitoring of the preliminary processes for the implementation of IPEP at the national, regional and district/constituency levels.

The findings of the monitoring exercise was categorized under; Level of stakeholder awareness about the IPEP policy and intervention, Observation of the composition and activities of the 10-regional Ad-hoc Committees and the Validation and reporting of District/Constituency Infrastructural Needs Assessment.