Two Foundations and a City; an alliance of opportunities for development

 

If you are familiar with the phrase that preaches taking two to knit a bargain, you most likely have wondered if there is a third party and or beneficiary lurking. Questions like these, unless obvious, are often left unanswered. They say for every rule, there is an allowable variation. In this story, you are certainly satisfying your curiosity about who takes the bargain.

This is a story of Fondation Botnar and STAR-Ghana Foundation knitting a bargain for and with the city of Koforidua, so you would be absolutely right to say two “Foundations and a city” is an exception of the knitting rule because it is a three-way bargain. A bargain that requires “duty bearers to take young people seriously and get young people involved in governance.” This has become necessary because of the apparent exclusion of the youth in local governance according to the District League Table valuation.

During a two-day project development workshop in Koforidua, Project Manager for ‘Action for Youth Development (AfYD) Our City Project’ , Dr Ernestina Korleki-Tetteh, highlighted the steps preceding the workshop, and the different levels of engagements with stakeholders including young people, the courtesy calls on the Omanhene, the municipal chief executive among others, to deliberate and provide input for the design and implementation of the pro-youth project.

Community Based Organizations (CBOs) took turns to pitch their project proposals and undertook review exercises to tailor the drafts to more youth-centered initiatives. The engagement of these potential partners is under the ‘Action for Youth Development (AfYD) Our City Project’ implemented by STAR-Ghana Foundation with funding from Fondation BOTNAR.

Dr Tetteh said, “the project seeks is to see a municipality where young people are informed and have capacity to participate actively in governance and influence improved access to social and economic opportunities, and services delivery in the municipality.”

“We want duty bearers to take young people seriously and get young people involved in governance” she re-emphasized.

Head of Programmes at STAR-Ghana Foundation, Eunice Racheal Agbenyadzi, in her opening remarks indicated that the workshop presents an opportunity to show how interlinked their projects are. According to her, “the workshop will allow learning spaces around the different things being done and also learning the different connections collectively.” The Head of Programmes also emphasized that the municipality is a critical actor in the project, thus the workshop sought to create an opportunity to discuss ways to involve the municipality, especially young people in development. Ms. Agbenyadzi cautioned the Community Based Organizations (CBOs) against the tendency to think that the different partner projects will be standalone projects.

This Project Development Training offered participants tremendous insights into STAR-Ghana Foundation’s operations and how the AfYD call fits within the broader approach.

“Our City Project” seeks to contribute to a municipality where young people are informed and have the capacity to participate actively in governance and influence improved services across all sectors, through youth driven initiatives. The three-year project under AfYD is sited in Koforidua in the New Juabeng South Municipality of the Eastern Region.

For her part, the Head of Finance and Operations, Mary Sabbah, took the participating organizations through SGF’s way of budgeting. She stressed the importance of making “transactions easily understood by whoever is to review and easily traced.”

AfYD

In 2020, the district league table (DLT 2020) rated the New Juabeng municipality as one of the ten least performing districts on governance. The score indicates a mediocre performance in the implementation of its action plan for development, and as the action plan is a critical tool for development, its poor implementation impacts on the quality of services

The Action for Youth Development (AfYD) project with a focus on the youth as the primary target will strengthen the capacities of youth led/based organisations to mobilise, represent and engage constructively with duty bearers to sustainably address their needs and priorities in decisions and resources distribution.

Overall, this project will contribute to ensuring that young people are not relegated in the development processes and benefits thereof.

It seeks to promote partnership between duty bearers and citizens to ensure that development programming is more meaningful for young people and delivers health and wellbeing, access to social services, including education, decent work for young people.

The project is approached from an inclusion perspective, thereby contributing to reducing inequalities within access to social services for the different categories of young people.

Through this focus, the AfYD makes a direct contribution to the achievement of SDGs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10 and 16.