SEND Ghana has begun processes to collate citizens’ inputs towards the preparation of the 2018 national budget.

In this regard, the Upper West Region took its turn of the Regional Citizens’ Inputs Forum where stakeholders made inputs in the areas of education, health and social protection.

In the area of education, the participants wanted the 2018 budget to capture the provision of more educational infrastructure and Teaching Learning Materials (TLMs) as well as allocation of more resources for Circuit Supervisors to enhance monitoring and supervision.

They also advocated proper consultation and inclusion of private school operators in the designing of educational policies and distribution of resources to enhance education in the country.

Making the education curricular more practical and the issue of teacher upgrading were also raised by participants for consideration in the 2018 budget.

For the area of health, provision of infrastructure, training of more health staff to boost the human resource, provision of incentive packages to outreach staff and procurement of vaccines were among the issues raised for consideration by the participants.

Increment of the social protection grant and expansion to cover more people, provision of resources for district social workers and a review of the computer ranking system dominated the inputs made by participants in the area of social protection.

Mr Bashiru Jumah, Upper West Regional Programme Officer for SEND Ghana noted that in the past, citizens had always viewed the budget as a tool for only the technocrats and politicians.

He said because of this, citizens do not actually pay attention to what constituted the budget as they did not make any input into the preparation of the budget.

He said SEND Ghana had over the years been trying to whip up the interest of citizens in the preparation of the budget by creating the opportunity for them to express their concerns that would be collated and submitted to the Ministry of Finance.

Mr Joseph Laryea, an Economist at the Ministry of Finance said the budget belonged to the people and so inputs towards the preparation of the budget must also come from the people.

He said the Ministry recognised the fact that the budget was for the people and always made efforts to translate it into different local languages including Gonja, Dagbani, Twi, Ga and Ewe to enhance easy understanding.

Mr Laryea explained that his presence at the Regional Citizens’ Input Forum was to afford him the opportunity to make a presentation to them on agriculture, health, education and social protection for them to understand and make informed inputs.

He said the inputs would be collated by SEND Ghana and submitted to the Ministry of Finance with justification in a consultative forum for consideration into the national budget.