Ghana - Initiative to Strengthen Public Expenditure Accountability Begins

Published in Accra Mail - The Integrated Social Development Centre (ISODEC) and its partners are implementing a five-year project entitled "Strengthening Institutions for Public Expenditure Accountability" in the country.

The project is, inter alia, aimed at expanding individual and institutional capacity for expenditure monitoring and analysis, development of policy alternatives and constructive engagements among all stakeholders.

This came to light at a day's dissemination workshop on programme budgeting and benefit incidence analysis for education, health and water in Accra yesterday. The workshop was organized by ISODEC and the Global Development Network (GDN) and attended by stakeholders in education, health and water sectors of the Ghanaian economy.

Presenting a paper on the programme budgeting, Mr. Daniel Chachu, a Policy Assistant at ISODEC, added that as part of the project, a programme budgeting study in the three sectors was conducted. The study, he hinted, sought to analyse available information on government expenditure and budget for the sectors for the period 2006 to 2008. According to him, efforts were being made to identify the administrative sources of spending for each of the three sectors, acquire budget data from each of the sources, and to aggregate and present the data in a way that demonstrates something meaningful about the money being spent.

In conducting the research, a field survey was also conducted in the 10 regions of Ghana and information was gathered from both users and providers of these services.

Education: For the past three years, the education sector received the highest chunk of government budgetary support in the country. Actual education expenditure as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the period under review was above 8% of GDP, increasing from 8.3% in 2006 to 9.9% in 2008. The research revealed that the bulk of expenditures went into recurrent expenditure which constitutes on the average over 80% of total expenditure. In 2006, the recurrent expenditure as a share of total education spending was about 82% and this reduced marginally to about 80% in 2007 but went up to about 87% in 2008.

While salaries and wages constitute a large component of not only recurrent expenditure (over 78%) but also total national education spending (over 64%). Non-wagerecurrent expenditure (administration and service expenses) was 17.9% of totalexpenditure in 2006 and this dropped to 15.2% in 2007, representing an increased of 18.9% in 2008. Although, recurrent expenditure at levels of the education sector is far above capital expenditure, recurrent expenditure was found to be highest at the lower levels of education than at the highest levels of education.

Health: The study was quick to disclose that the Ministry of Health received the second largest proportion of the government of Ghana expenditure. Since 2006, the largest chunk of health spending-over 83% goes into recurrent expenditure. Thisrecurrent expenditure is gradually moving towards funding more non-wage expenditures. Wage share in recurrent health budget reduced from over 60% in 2006 to about 40% in 2008. The share of actual capital spending in total health

Water: The research identified two sources of funding for Ghana's water sector, namely domestic and donor. The domestic sources are funded from the national and district levels. The District Assembly's Common Fund, which is the main source of funding for district assemblies, is also used to meet rural water expenditure. District Assemblies allocate part of this fund for counterpart funding and other activities in the water sector. The discretionary sources of funding include the Government of Ghana, and Internally Generated Fund of the

On the whole, the research suggested to that there should be efforts by Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to ensure vertical and horizontal flow of information among agencies and the various stakeholders. The
benefit incidence analysis showed government spending education, health and water is not well targeted at the poor. The poor benefits from only about 5% of government's water expenditure 1.9% of public tertiary education 13.2% for public secondary education, according to Ghana Living Standards Survey (2005/6).

* Source: Mashudu Ankiilu Kunateh - Ghanaian Chronicle