George Obeng Osei, the Ga South Municipality Officer in charge of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), has urged the citizenry at the grassroots to participate fully in all development process in their communities to help strengthen the nation’s decentralisation process.

He explained that local governance had afforded the opportunity to those at the grassroots level to participate effectively and efficiently to ensure transparency, accountability and probity in community ownership.

Mr Osei made the call at a meeting on the implementation of social auditing for residents in the Ga South municipality to help the citizenry hold duty bearers accountable for the service they provided at the local level.

Under the National Decentralisation Action Plan (NDAP) and policy framework for the year 2015 – 2019, the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development was directed to ensure Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) established social auditing to promote and increase participation with strengthened grassroots accountability.

He called for “effective and efficient decentralisation process by enforcing relationship between potential beneficiaries, stakeholders and service providers through all the processes in development policies and programmes.

“To ensure effective and efficient social auditing, the citizenry need to have access to vital documents at the various assemblies such as the District Medium Term Development Plan, Annual Action Plan, Budget and Annual progress reports, so as to assess and make conclusion on whether the assembly has achieved its set goals or not.

“In some of the communities, residents provide support in terms of manpower, materials or cash and the assembly responsible for projects does its part for successful outcomes, forms a committee which does the follow up and coordinates activities between it and duty bearers conscientiously, till challenges are fixed,” Mr Osei noted.

The challenges of water not flowing through the pipelines to bring relief to residents, was thoroughly dealt with, for a lasting solution through the formation of a committee to help find solution to the perennial water problem.

Those present at the meeting include Nii Kofi Lantei, Gyaase of Domeabra; Joseph Akrashie, a member of the unit committee; Sarah Sackey; James Dzreke and Emmanuel Awartey. All community opinion leaders joined the other members of the social audit committee and pledged to follow-up on duty bearers, to compel them solve some challenges affecting accelerated development of the municipality.