Citizen Engagement Is Needful For Local Governnance – Mayor

The Kumasi City Mayor, Mr. Osei Assibey Antwi has stated that citizen engagement is an important approach that helps local governments to improve upon service delivery, proper public financial management and good governance.
According to him, citizens play an important role in advocating and helping public institutions to be more transparent, accountable and effective as a result of which the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) has worked tirelessly to deeply engage citizens in this era of COVID-19 pandemic to help improve the development of the Metropolis, in spite of the challenges in getting people actively on board.
The Mayor made these observations in a speech read on his behalf by the Metropolitan Coordinating Director, Mr. Kwadwo Akuamoah Boateng at the Citizen Engagement Workshop last Wednesday, at the Royal Lamerta Hotel in Kumasi.
The workshop, which had a session with some virtual resource persons on webinar from VNG (Netherlands), is aimed at how to disseminate covid-19 protocols messages considering different behavioural attitudes.
The KMA, under the VNG International sponsorship deals project, organised the training workshop “to collaboratively share various creative ways to deepen citizen engagement” in the midst of COVID-19 pandemic.
Participants drawn from the media, assembly members, NCCE, NYA, transport unions and traders’ groups, among others were taken through a brainstorming breakout section on how to carve covid-19 messages to suit varying human behaviors.
Mr. Assibey Antwi explained that the Assembly’s ways of engaging citizens before the COVID-19 has no restrictions but the various restrictions imposed by government made engagement of citizens very challenging this time and the KMA needed “effective partnership with civil society, relevant stakeholders, advocates and development partners to come together” and strategize various ways to deepen citizen engagement.
He said sharing information through mediums like radio, television, internet or cross-sectoral rapid risk assessment and focused group discussions where only targeted groups were engaged, as well as advocacy and sensitisation programmes, were “various ways we can adopt to engage citizens”.
A Senior Lecturer at the Department of Planning, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Mr. Prince Aboagye Anokye, who was one of the resource persons explained that the VNG International is an Association of Local Governments in the Netherlands which provided technical support to the Kumasi city.

From Thomas Agbenyegah Adzey, Kumasi

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