Thursday, 28 March

Workshop to localise SDGs opened

News
The Ghana Institute of Public Administration and the United Cities and Local Government for Africa (UCLG) on Wednesday, 24 April 2019 opened a three-day training workshop for local authorities and territorial managers across the continent on the need to localise the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to promote growth in their locality.

The participants, who were drawn from Ghana, Cameroon, Benin, Nigeria, Togo, Sierra Leone, Uganda and South Africa will be taken through a three-day course training for learning, sharing and exchanging experiences and best practices in order to raise the level of awareness and advocacy for local actors in the SDG ownership and localisation process as well as territorial planning.

Speaking at the opening ceremony, the Deputy Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) outlined the need for such a workshop in the sub-region.

He said: “The essence is not only to learn new skills on how to extend the goals to the different local authorities, but my emphasis will be on how the sensitisation goes down to the very community level and we have experience from the MDGs implementation where communities were made to understand their roles and their responsibilities and it is the same with the SDGs as well.

“When you break down the SGDs, you’ll find out that it is the individual, the family, the community that is going to help us achieve these objectives, which are – environmental cleanliness, issues to do with water and sanitation, ending hunger and eliminating poverty and developing proper water and sewage systems wherever it’s feasible. The creation of wealth among individuals in the rural areas is all part of the SDGs because it’s a holistic agenda that is supposed to help every person in their development, whether they are in the village or they are in the city. So, that is the essence of this workshop.”

President of the National Association of Local Authorities of Ghana (NALAG) and the mayor of Tema, Felix Nii Annan, called on the participants to engage various stakeholders in implementing the SDGs in their communities.

Source: Ghana/ClassFMonline.com/91.3FM

Source: Emmanuel Mensah