NDPC courts SADA’s support for long-term dev’t plan

The National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) has called on the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) to support the commission to develop a comprehensive 40-year development plan for the country.

The Senior Technical Advisor of the NDPC, Dr Grace Bediako, told the Daily Graphic in Accra that SADA’s support for the plan was needed to help make it complete and easier for implementation.

She explained that the commission would soon incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), African Union’s Agenda 2063, and other global development goals into the 40-year plan, which was aimed at finding a lasting solution to the piece meal development policies that the country currently grapples with.

That, she said, would be done in collaboration with stakeholders constituting the cross-sectoral planning group with members such as the Ministry of Finance (MoF), Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESTI), the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS).

Workshop on SDGs

Dr Bediako spoke at a day’s workshop organised by SADA and NDPC on how to incorporate the SDGs into the country’s development agenda.

The workshop brought together representatives from the public and the private sector to deliberate and effectively incorporate the SDGs into the SADA zone.

She said the commission was set to complete the 40-year long-term development plan for the country, before the 2018 deadline.

According to her, the development plan was almost ready for the next phase, which is the sensitisation and orientation stage in 2017.

Dr Bediako expressed the hope that Ghanaians would help to make that document a major development signpost for the country’s accelerated growth in all spheres of national life.

Commitment of the authority

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of SADA, Dr Charles Abugri, for his part, expressed the commitment of the authority to developing the savannah zone.

He explained that the timing was opportune for Ghana, and for the zone in view of the on-going process to develop a Long- term National Development Plan (LTNDP), led by NDPC, and the Northern Savanah Ecological Zone (NSEZ), Transformational Plan, that SADA was embarking upon.

“The NSEZ is designated as a joint planning area by the national development planning systems. The SADA zone planning process aims to engineer the economic and social transformation of the savannah,” he said.

He noted that as with the consultations on the LTNDP, which were organised in late 2015, the authority would work closely with NDPC and the regional coordinating councils to undertake stakeholder engagements on the SDGs, distil indicators and targets relevant for the zone.

Endorsement of the Agenda 2030

Following the endorsement of the agenda 2030 in September last year, Ghana is seeking to incorporate and localise the SDGs in its development process, development financing agenda statistics.

The SDGs into a successor framework to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the NDPC, which is the state agency responsible for incorporating the SDGs into Ghana’s national development agenda, reveals its role in incorporating the SDGs over the years.