Prof. Samuel Kobina Annim
GOVERNMENT STATISTICIAN, Prof. Samuel Kobina Annim, has called on institutions to redirect their efforts at designing rigorous policy processes and assessment rather than ‘stand alone’ policies.
He said weaknesses in policies aimed at achieving long term outcomes, contradictions in GDP growth and other variables, contributed to the difficulty in assessing the performance of the economy.
Speaking at a lecture organised by the Central University in Accra on the theme: “Conceptualisation of National Policies: Issues of Capacity and Practice”, Prof. Annim said that institutions had failed to identify gaps in policy capacity and practice in an attempt to implement and address policy issues.
These gaps, he noted, were “the lack of institutional frameworks and capacity for auditing national policies, pre-career learning to adequately integrate the tenets of policy capacity and practice and the non-existence of a formal in-service learning platform.”
He, however, suggested some key questions that needed to be considered with regard to these.
“Has policy impacted Ghana’s social demographic and economic status? Given the general knowledge that every policy has a trade-off, do policy makers articulate the cost associated with each of their interventions? Does Ghana have criteria for debating national policies?” he quizzed.
Among other things, Prof. Annim mentioned some indicators that both academicians making policy recommendations and policy makers evaluating policy could utilise. These include policy space, instruments and targets, outcome and impact, sequence and hierarchy, cost benefit analysis and data-baseline.
He further called for the development of national criteria for assessing the effectiveness of policies and the establishment of an independent national data policy institute.
BY Ebenezer K. Amponsah