A project to help district assemblies to generate more revenues to support their development activities has been launched at Sagnarigu.

The project dubbed: “Citizens’ for Domestic Revenue Mobilization,” (C4DRM) seeks to support district assemblies to develop strong revenue mobilization strategies to enhance their pro-poor development funding, and eventually, mobilize citizens' groups with young women leaders to mobilize revenues.

The C4DRM is being implemented at Sagnarigu Municipality and the Zabzugu District by NORSAAC, a civil society organization, with support from OXFAM.

The two assemblies have the potential to raise a lot of revenues internally because there are a lot of property and business entities within their jurisdictions but they were only able to raise about 60 per cent of their approved estimates during the 2018 financial year.

Mr Peter Frimpong Owusu, Northern Regional Budget Officer, who spoke during the launch of the project at Gbanyami, a suburb of Sagnarigu, said it had come at the right time to support the assemblies to collect more revenues to support their developmental needs.

As part of the launch, a two-day training on budgeting, and revenue improvement action plans amongst others was held for budget officers and revenue collectors of the beneficiary assemblies to build their capacity to enhance their work for increased revenue collection, and transparency and accountability in its utilisation.

Mr Owusu underscored the importance of revenues in national development emphasising that innovative measures were being taken to block revenue leakages to increase the revenue base of the assemblies to undertake their needed developmental projects.

Mr Alhassan Mahamadu Kamara, Sagnarigu Municipal Coordinating Director was happy that the project would help to orient revenue collectors to properly engage tax payers to collect the needed revenues to support the assemblies’ activities.

He said the Ghana Beyond Aid agenda would be realised if the citizenry became increasingly aware and willing to pay taxes emphasising the need to do more to educate the citizenry to pay their taxes.

Madam Hafsatu Sey Sumani, Head of Programmes and Policy at NORSAAC called for more commitment on the parts of the assemblies to collect more domestic revenues and be accountable in their utilisation to encourage the citizenry to willingly pay their taxes.