Dan Olsen in Ghana

Dan is working with EWB’s good governance team on water and sanitation projects in the Northern Region of Ghana. The goal of the placement is to work within the framework of the Ghanaian government to develop improved planning mechanisms for selecting rural water and sanitation infrastructure projects.

The Ghanaian government operates at three levels: national, regional, and district. Dan spent the first three months of his overseas placement in the East Gonja District of the Northern Region, which has a population of 175,000 people. After the first three months, he transitioned to the Northern Region government, which is based in the regional capital Tamale. This region serves a population of 1,820,000 people.

EWB is working towards strengthening the monitoring and evaluation practices for rural infrastructure across the districts in the Northern Region. Our main assumption is that current rural infrastructure projects are not meeting the needs of the poor because they are not well planned, sited, monitored and evaluated by the districts. We want to change that.

EWB’s work aims to create an environment for high-quality district development plans for infrastructure and to follow-up on their plans.

At the district level, we are building a set of planning tools and behaviour change approaches that will allow us to effectively change the way districts undergo the following activities:

• Field monitoring
• Data gathering analysis
• Planning and siting of infrastructure development

At the regional level, we are building a set of planning tools and implementing a behaviour change approach that allows the Northern Region to:

• Use their field visits to gather data on the situation of the region, as well as build their capacity to plan and analyze data
• Analyze their own data such that they have a clear picture of the Region’s situation and needs and can advise policies accordingly
• Vet the districts projects in relation to the District 5-year development plans and their District’s current data

International development donors are influential investors in the development of Ghana's services and infrastructure, so another part of EWB’s work is to document the impact of donor’s programs on the districts' ability to plan and influence their policies and practices. Specifically:

• Change the way donors impose priorities on the Districts, namely by giving them more time to plan, more resources to monitor and by valuing the existing 5-year development plans
• Change the way they perceive the Region and increase its decision-making power
• Change the content and the way they attempt to build District capacity through workshops

Dan is contributing to our overall aim to reach 80 per cent of the Northern Region’s districts, three regional offices, and four major donors by 2011.