The World Bank is providing US$155 million to help Ghana implement the West Africa Coastal Areas Resilience Investment Project Phase 2 (WACA ResIP 2). The 5-year project, led by the Government of Ghana through the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESTI), will help address some critical challenges within selected coastal communities in the Greater Accra and Volta regions.
During a stakeholder engagement with civil society organizations and CSOs at Sogakope, the WACA Project Environmental Management Specialist, Dr. Memuna Mattah, explained that Ghana recently joined the program following some success stories in countries that participated in Phase 1. She indicated that Ghana, in partnership with The Gambia and Guinea-Bissua, forms Phase 2 of the project, which began in March this year, and will pool resources to address coastal pollution, flooding and erosion while protecting lives and property. She noted that Ghana will use experiences from other countries to ensure successful implementation of the project.
“This project is designed to assist West African coastal countries to address issues affecting communities in coastal areas such as pollution, erosion, flooding, which are also common in almost all coastal countries. You know, one country alone cannot do it. This WACA project was born out of discussions between the countries of Ghana, Gambia and Guinea-Bissau to explore how resources could be used to help these countries.
It started years ago when six countries had already joined the program, including Togo, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and Mauritania. After seeing these countries make progress and also successes, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau and Gambia also signed up for the second phase, called RECIP-2. This is a West African program and investment aimed at strengthening the resilience of coastal communities and also helping to address coastal and degradation issues. Touching on the progress made so far, Dr Mattah intimated that an implementation manual has been put in place to serve as a guide for the project. She said such projects deals with human lives hence the need to ensure their rights are protected.
“Preparatory works are being done. These include putting institutional arrangements in place, how the project should be implemented, which are the key stakeholders in terms of institutions, implementing agencies, what are their roles. So the project has been able to develop an implementation manual indicating all the structures, institutional structures, how the project should be implemented. We also know that there will be complaints and problems if you implement a project because it has to do with communities and people. Consequently, the manual of the appeal authority has been developed, which is available, then we operationalize the manual or the content of the manual, so that the symptoms of the people at the start of the infrastructure begins. Thus, all of these structures have been used, ”she added.
World Bank’s support includes a 150 million dollars loan and a scholarship of 5 million. To this end, the Civil Society groups, OSC, were attached to this project to ensure transparency and responsibility. The Coordinator for the CCF Coastal CSOs Forum, Noble Wadjah intimated that CSOs involvement in the project will ensure an effective and efficient execution of the project. He opined that CSOs are more conversant with the communities and they can ensure that the support get to the beneficiaries.
“The whole project is a partnership between the World Bank and the Government of Ghana, so there are certain agreements among these two entities.
We are setting protocols that inures to the benefit of human rights in project administration or in project management or project delivery, human rights, environmental rights, community rights and things like that. So we are trying to give them a training on those protocols which will be a defining ground for everybody who is participating in the project. The project has made room for civil society participation, and the role of civil society in the project is to ensure transparency and accountability in its management, given that it is a loan given to states and its management has to meet certain standards. That does not mean that the executive government agencies are incompetent. However, it is not an indictment of government institutions, but it is simply part of the participatory aspect of achieving development democracy”.
“So it is just to make sure that we all do what is necessary to do in the use of the fund for the benefit of states and citizens. We have civil society organizations with different expertise, so we have segregated them along those lines, where different groups have participated in the project at different levels. We have had involvement in terms of capacity building, understanding the project itself, understanding the different rules of civil society organizations to classify them to work on the project, because the project has different levels of intervention Some are very scientific and so we need civil society organizations with that kind of background, some of them are socially oriented and everything you might know. We tried to select those with such experience to participate in the project,” she added. The WACA project is a coastal resilience initiative with previous assessments showing some hotspots in six districts of Greater Accra and the Volta Region. Some communities that will benefit from the project are all three coastal communities in the Volta Region, namely Ketu Municipal Assembly, South Tongu and Aflao. Areas in the Greater Accra Region include the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, especially around the Korle Lagoon, Glefe, Krokrobite, Bortianor and Langma, which have suffered coastal erosion due to climate change. The project, which consists of four components, aims, among others, to strengthen regional integration, strengthen policy and institutional frameworks, strengthen national physical and social investments and project management or national coordination. The project covers 9 countries, six of which are participating in the first phase. Ghana, Gambia and Guinea Bissua make up the WACA ResiP2 phase two. Participants at the forum were taken through topics such as Resettlement Action Plan, Gender Based Violence and Environmental and Social Commitment Plan.
Source: gbcghanaonline
