Pathways to Inclusive and Responsive Governance in Ghana
The Inclusive Governance team of the Hewlett Foundation’s Gender Equity and Governance program is revamping our Medium page to create a dialogue around the pathways we are exploring together with our grantee partners to make governments more responsive to the needs of all people, particularly those who have experienced the most marginalization. We are excited to use this platform to engage, share what we are learning, and exchange ideas with our grantee partners and the leaders and organizations interested in building inclusive societies and responsive governments around the globe. We invite your comments, questions, and feedback.
We are a relatively small team of three program officers and two program associates with an annual budget of around $30 million. Our team consists of Diakhoumba Gassama (Program Officer), David Sasaki (Program Officer), Ousseynou Ngom (Program Officer), Jodie Clark (Program Associate), and Tate Barend (Program Associate).
Last April, we launched a new Inclusive Governance strategy, which aims to support local communities to exercise power so that government becomes more responsive to their needs. To advance this goal, we focus on three outcomes in four priority countries (Ghana, Kenya, Mexico, and Senegal):
· Increase the resilience and resourcing of social movements.
· Enable underserved populations to access and use public information in their activities and campaigns.
· Enable an independent media that both monitors government and reflects the perspectives of underserved populations.
Shortly after launching the strategy, we began working with locally based consultants in each of the four countries to develop country plans with a set of recommendations that tailor the overall strategy to each country’s unique context. In Ghana, we worked with Dinah Adiko, Zayan Imoro, and Teiko Sabah, who brought their experience in governance, gender, and development to help shape how we operationalize the strategy in the country.
The Ghana consultants team started their work with us in the spring of 2022 by completing a scoping study to better understand social movements, the use of public information, and the media in Ghana. They convened stakeholder workshops in three regions of Ghana, along with informational interviews and a broad survey. By October, they shared a draft report with scenarios and tradeoffs to consider. The report offers a menu of options to support populations that have been underserved by their government — from rural/market women to persons with disabilities — and guidance for how we can better support local Ghanaian organizations, including local movements outside of Accra. The report outlined the following high-level recommendations:
- Partner with local philanthropic initiatives, including Ghana Philanthropy Forum, to coordinate long-term support to emerging organizations and movements.
- Strengthen locally based regranting and capacity-building organizations, including STAR Ghana and West African Civil Society Initiative to support small and local organizations across Ghana
- Support meeting spaces that draw national attention to the needs and aspirations of underserved populations, such as CDD Kronti ne Akwamu lectures on democracy and good governance, IMANI’s iManifesto, and the Civil Society Partnership for Social Accountability in Social Protection.
With these recommendations in hand, we landed in Ghana in late October to gather feedback from our grantee partners and to meet with feminist and youth organizations outside of Accra. Shortly after arriving, we took part in the Media Foundation for West Africa’s WAMECA conference with the theme of women in media. The panels brought together practitioners, scholars, and policymakers to discuss the obstacles and opportunities facing women in media in West Africa. For instance, we heard from women journalists and editors that they have had to navigate sexual harassment their entire careers without proper harassment or whistleblowing protocols in place.
In Accra, we hosted a convening with our current grantee partners to solicit their feedback on the draft country plan. We gained valuable feedback from our grantee partners, including:
- A concern about the credibility of government data and the need to explore alternative data sources while making government data more credible.
- The need for national civil society organizations (CSOs) to engage grassroots CSOs from the inception of project conceptualization to ensure project ownership among grassroots organizations from the beginning.
- Partners noted that CSOs ought to be more deliberate in engaging the private sector and local philanthropists.
Grantee partners were enthusiastic to test new approaches that support the movements of underserved populations in Ghana. Ghanaian civil society leaders expressed both hope and skepticism that Hewlett Foundation could involve more local philanthropists to pursue inclusive governance and gender equity in Ghana.
We also traveled to Tamale, the fastest-growing city in West Africa. Our days were spent crisscrossing the city meeting with local organizations focused on women and youth empowerment. Songtaba shared their work building trust with local communities to promote the status and rights of women. Norsaac described their experience working with community-based organizations to build a regional women’s movement to empower individuals to assert their rights. On our final day, YEFL Ghana! spoke about their approach to youth empowerment through building their agency to lead change for themselves and their communities through the Youth Centers. These organizations highlight the important work local organizations do at a grassroots level for underserved populations. However, they are constrained by the project-based funding of government funders who have their own strategic priorities. Several of the organizations described the difficulty of pursuing their own strategies when most of their funding is earmarked for specific donor goals, such as countering violent extremism. As we drove through Tamale, and over these past months, we have wrestled with the tradeoffs of facilitating coalitions among several organizations versus directing our funding to a single organization.
As we continue to shift more of our grantmaking budget to support locally based organizations we are wrestling with questions, for instance:
- How do we help facilitate collaboration between social movements, the media, and think tanks?
- Can we help enable “vertical integration” between informal community groups, local NGOs in northern Ghana, and national organizations in Accra? Would proposal co-design and budget transparency increase trust?
- When and how does it make sense to facilitate peer learning between partners in Ghana and other priority countries: Kenya, Senegal, and Mexico?
- How much time should we dedicate to advocating for local philanthropic support for governance and gender work?
We continue to learn from our grantee partners. We are following the West Africa Civil Society Institute’s work to reimagine the role of the INGO in global civil society. STAR Ghana continues to document its work to cultivate more domestic support for development in the Northern and Upper West regions of the country. And we are learning about the role of the media to require conflict of interest declarations from judges.
As we continue to engage and ask questions about our new strategy and the paths toward more open, inclusive, responsive, and accountable governance, we hope to keep you updated through posts like this on our Medium Page. We invite you to join our discussion and help us find answers to our questions.
Written By Tate Barend and David Sasaki
