The study was conducted in Ghana
between 2014 and 2017 by Dr Martin J. Williams, Associate Professor of Public
Administration at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford in
collaboration with the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) and the
Local Government Service Secretariat (LGSS).
The study shows that about a
third of projects, started between 2011 and 2013, were never completed.
Presenting a paper on Spatial
Infrastructure Data in Ghana, Dr Williams said the costs of unfinished projects
to Ghana, both economically and socially were huge, as shown from the
administrative data that already exists within government.
These administrative data
included hardcopy reports or soft copy word documents submitted by local
governments to MMDAs or the NDPC as part of normal annual performance reports.
By collating and transforming
this data into a database covering about 14,000 projects across a wide variety
of agencies and funding sources such as the District Assemblies Common Fund
(DACF), GETFund, Internally Generated Funds and central government funding.
The study was able to establish
that on average, unfinished projects had had about 65 per cent of the work
completed and 56 per cent of the contract sum disbursed.
He said 18.6 per cent of MMDAs
investment expenditure was on projects that were unlikely to ever be finished,
noting: “that’s almost a fifth of infrastructure budget going straight into
waste”.
He said “these are mostly small
projects that are being done by the MMDAs, so these are six-room classroom
blocks, boreholes, wells, administrative blocks; the kind of projects that
should take between four and 12 months on average”.
The study also found that
contrary to popular opinion that unfinished projects were due to corruption and
politics or elections, the findings showed that neither of these were the
cause.
It said more work has been done
on the projects than had been paid for and project completion rates were also
consistent across the years.
Rather districts were spreading
their resources for projects too thinly on too many projects than they could
afford to complete every year, this notwithstanding, projects were more
effectively delivered through local government than central government.
He said the findings were a
demonstration of how administrative data could be valuable for policy
preparation purposes as well as for academic work.
Dr Williams said the database has
since been extended to 2016 and now had about 40,000 project records and work
was ongoing, with CERGIS and support from the Ghana Statistical Service, to
locate and map these projects.
In the long term, the project
hopes to create a comprehensive national database of infrastructure stocks in
Ghana with a cross-sectional platform for accessing data on public facility
locations, both established and in construction.
This would be useful for planning
for both central government and MMDAs as well as for impact evaluation and
value for money analysis, says Dr. Williams.
Although a roadmap has been drawn
following discussions with stakeholders, progress had stalled.
Ms Tomomi Tanaka, Senior Economist
at the World Bank also reiterated that spatial analysis.
She said the analysis of data or
information that identifies geographic location or features and boundaries on
earth such as oceans, constructed features and others, could help government,
CSOs and development partners, to do better targeting of their interventions
for poverty alleviation.
Ms Tanaka called for the creation
of an online platform to share district-level data and present poverty trends,
environmental degradation, climate change, disasters and access to services,
with maps.
GNA
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