Development Priorities

In line with the GPRS II, Sector policies and the fact that the Nanumba North District Assembly exists to facilitate improvement in the quality of life of the people by harnessing resources and collaborating with private and public sector agencies for the provision of facilities and delivery of quality services; and, considering the fact that the Nanumba North District Assembly is a food producing area, and the human resources its greatest asset, special attention would be given to private enterprise development and agriculture, education and training, health and water & sanitation. Also Community Participation in decision-making processes is going to be encouraged.

Gender considerations would also be of paramount concern to the Assembly at the various levels of its development aspiration. Gender considerations and the participation of communities would ensure balanced decisions, which would ensure that projects are successful and sustainable and, benefits are spread. Thus the District Assembly’s priorities  for 2006-2009 would be:

Priorities for Private Sector Competitiveness
Under this pillar, the priority areas will include:

• Address access to credit gap
• Improving yield to food crop
• Promotion of Irrigation Agriculture
• Reduction in post-harvest losses
• Development of marketing channels
• Promotion of Tourism
• Promotion of Small-Scale Businesses especially among women
• Improve road and communication network
• Improving household incomes.

Human Resource Development 

1. Ensure access and utilization of quality education
2. Improve potable water and sanitation facility coverage
3. Improve access and delivery of quality health service
4. Increase HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention
5. Ensure community participation in the delivery of social services
6. Collaborate with other stakeholders to institute skills enhancement training for the youth
7. Promotion of gender balance and equity
8. Rapid response to people affected by disasters
9. Expansion of the Mutual Health and Social Security Schemes to cover most people in the district
10. Enforcing the rights of the vulnerable, excluded and the physically challenged.

Good Governance and Civic Responsibility

• Practical efforts would be made to enhance decentralization and principle of community participation in the development process
• Promote and ensure Justice, peace and security
• Ensure transparency and accountability
• Strengthen lower structures of the District Assembly
• Co-ordinate  and collaborate with NGOs/CBOs an CSOs 
• Facilitate rule of law and order
• Timely access to justice for all
• Transparency of District Assembly decision-making
• Public participation in decision-making
• Decentralization of responsibilities
• Observance of both rights and responsibilities, and
• Discipline and observance of laws, rules, regulations in both public and private sectors of society

  Good Governance and Civic Responsibility issues
•    Inadequate staff residential accommodation
•    High number of abandoned /uncompleted official projects
•    Inadequate transport facilities(vehicles)
•    Low internal generated funds 
•    Lack of internet facility at the Central Administration and other key departments
•    Inadequate office and residential accommodation for the Police /BNI
•    Haphazard development especially in Bimbilla township
•    Most existing public buildings not accessible to DWDS. 


Health
Objectives

1. Increase geographical and financial access to basic health services
2. Better quality care in all health facilities and during outreach
3. Improved efficiency in the health sector
4. Closer collaboration and partnership between the health sector and communities, other sectors and private providers both allopathic and traditional
5. Increase overall resources in the health sector, equitably and efficiently distributed.

Strategies

• Strengthen health service (District Health Service
• Re-orient Secondary and Tertiary service delivery to support primary health services
• Develop and implement programmes to train adequate number of new health teams 
• Provide and manage these services
• Improve capacity for policy analysis, performance monitoring and evaluation, and regulation of service delivery by health professionals
• Strengthen central support systems for human resource, logistics and supplies, financial and health information management
• Promote private sector involvement in the delivery of health services
• Strengthen inter sectoral collaboration
• Health Sector Programme of work

Health problems

•    Inadequate health personnel
•    Inadequate health infrastructure 
•    Inadequate infrastructure at the Bimbilla Hospital(congestion and overcrowding 
•    Inadequate VCT  centres
•    Low patronage of the Art by PLWHA
•    Existence of at risk Guinea worm communities
•    Low rate of iodated salt consumption
•    Very few baby friendly facilities
•    High rate of malnourished children

Agriculture
Objectives

Facilitate increase in food crop production
Maize        0.90 – 1.08 tons/ha
Rice        1.30 – 1.56 tons/ha
Millet        0.50 – 0.60 tons/ha
Sorghum    0.60 – 0.72 tons/ha
Groundnut    0.70 – 0.90 tons/ha
Cowpea    0.70 – 0.90 tons/ha
Soya beans    1.30 – 1.60 tons/ha
Yam             10.71 – 13.9 tons/ha
Cassava           6.43 – 8.40 tons/ha
Vegetables    increase 25% annually           

Post-harvest losses 30% - 20% 

1. Ensure food availability at household level
2. Enhance material availability for industry
3. Facilitate effective and efficient market for agricultural produce
4. Facilitate effective and efficient input supply and distribution system
5. Improve Extension service delivery
6. Control bushfire
7. HIV/AIDS control/ Gender mainstreaming in MoFA

Strategies

• Raising agricultural productivity
• Addressing the specific needs of farmers
• Ensuring that farmers adopt environmentally sustainable approaches to natural resource use, and finally
• Generating jobs and increasing income

Private sector Led Competitiveness
Agriculture / Food Security issues

•    Under utilization of agricultural land
•    Lack of irrigation facilities
•    Over reliance on rained fed agriculture 
•    Low income of farmers
•    High cost of agricultural input
•    Few agricultural extension agents 
•    Inadequate credit  facilities for women income generating groups

Water & Sanitation
Objectives

1. Provide improve access to potable water facilities on sustainable i.e. from 40.7% (2007) to 80% (2009)
2. Provide improve access to household latrines 1% (2007) to 15% (2009)
3. Put in place efficient and sustainable waste management
4. Finally to ensure that people observe good personal hygiene

Strategies

• Build capacity of both communities and District Assembly to manage water &sanitation facilities.
• Strengthen hygiene education
• Construct and rehabilitate potable water facilities.
• Promote household and institutional sanitation facilities.
• Promote and provide efficient waste management systems.
• Promote private sector to provide goods and services.
• Promote collaboration with NGOs, Donors (ESAs) and other stakeholders

Water and Sanitation issues

•    Inadequate portable water supply especially in Bimbilla township 
•    High number of broken down boreholes in the communities 
•    Inadequate toilet facilities 
•    High rate of open defecation 

Education
Objectives

1. To improve teaching and learning for quality pupil/student achievement
2. To improve good health and environmental sanitation in schools and educational institutions
3. Undertake a vigorous enrollment and retention drive particularly of the Girl-Child from a 74.6% (85.66%-Boys and 63.46% Girls) in 2002/2003 academic year to a near 100% by year 2005
4. To increase access to and participation in education and training and extend functional literacy facilities
5. To strengthen the governance, planning and resource management in the education sector to make it more efficient and effective
6. To improve drastically the physical infrastructure (classrooms, furniture & logistics) equitably throughout the district.

Strategies

• Enhance community participation in the delivery of education through
• Strengthening of School Management Committees (SMCs) and Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs)
• Awareness creation and animation
• Cost sharing
• Enrolment drive

Enhance quality of education in schools by:

1. Improve Teacher-Pupil ratio
2. Increase supervision and monitoring
3. Provision of teaching and learning materials
4. Incentive package for teachers

• Make adult literacy programmes more functional and acceptable and, provide support for skills acquisition programmes
• Increased number of visits of Circuit supervisors from once a term to at least twice by end of the period

EDUCATION (problems)

•    Inadequate school infrastructure 
•    Inadequate teachers Accommodation
•    Inadequate furniture for both pupils and teachers at all levels
•    Inadequate sanitary facilities 
•    High pupil teacher ratio 
•    Inadequate trained teachers in basic schools 
•    Low enrollment in basic schools 
•    Few Junior High Schools
•    High dropout rate especially for girls

Key  Potenials, Opportunities, Constraints and  Challenges (POCC)

The major developmental issues affecting Nanumba North District include among others:
-    Food Security
-    Low Income levels
-    High unemployment
-    Low literacy rate
-    Poor health
-    Insecurity

Monitoring And Evaluation

The decentralised development framework adopted by the country and for that matter the implementation of Medium Term Development Plan demands participatory approach. As a result, monitoring and evaluation starts right with the communities to the Unit Committees. These are collated on Area Council basis to the Assembly. 

The monitoring and evaluation would be based on the logical framework. Thus the institutional set-up for monitoring and evaluation are:
-    Communities/ Unit Committees
-    Area Councils
-    Sector Departments
-    NGOs/Donors
-    DPCU

MONITORING AND EVALUATION 
MONITORING DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES/PROJECTS.

It is extremely important to put in place measures to keep truck of the implementation and management of the entire plan. This ensures that activities are implemented on time or according to schedule and with the required level of efficiency. It is in the light of the foregoing that Monitoring and Evaluation of this plan is indispensable.

Generally, monitoring has the following objectives:

*To ascertain whether or not activities are truck and take corrective measures where possible.
*Identify successful interventions for replication in other areas of the district. 
*Obtain periodic data for further planning.

*Promote co-ordination and balance in service provision and utilization.
*Motivate as well as strengthen the capacity of the various actors such as government departments/agencies, NGO’s, CSO’s, FBO’s and the private sector in the collection and utilization of data to improve on service delivery.

MONITORING OF PHYSICAL PROJECTS.

The Assembly’s monitoring team: made up of DPC and other stakeholders shall be in charge of monitoring the execution of all physical projects. The team is made up of:

*The District Coordinating Director.
*The District Planning Officer.
*The District Engineer/Feeder Roads Engineer.
*The District Budget Officer.
*The District Gender Desk Officer.
*The District Finance Officer.
*The A./D Planning (GES)     in the case of educational projects.
*The District Director of Health Services in the case of health projects.
*The Chairperson of the Works Sub-Committee of the Assembly.

Representatives of beneficiary communities.

 The community representatives shall be made up of the Assemblyman (if he is resident in the community), the unit committee chairman and the chief’s representative. Since monitoring aims at assessing progress of work and filling the gaps rather than fault finding mission, the exercise would be undertaken with the active participation of various actors.

Apart from the district level monitoring, there shall be monitoring from the Regional and National. At the Regional Level, the Regional Coordinating Council as part of its major function will undertake regular monitoring of on-going activities in the district.

At the National level, since the district is enjoying a lot of donor support for the implementation of most of its programmes. A quarterly monitoring mission to the district would be untaken by a Team made up of members from the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Local Government and the Donor Organizations.

REVIEW OF THE PLAN

Apart from the periodic monitoring there shall be reviews of Annual Work Plans at mid-year and annual. This is to ascertain:

*The progress made in implementing the year’s work plan and budget.
*Status of implementation of programmes, projects and activities.
*The extent of achievement of indicators in the plan and budget.
*Outstanding activities and their continued relevance to area and district development.
*Identify programmes, projects that can be rolled over to the ensuing year.

EVALUATION OF DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES

A mid-term evaluation the plan will be carried out at the end of 2011 and the results and recommendations discussed at a stakeholder workshop.

This is expected to ensure that the output/inputs achieve are in line with the goal and objectives of the District Assembly and for that matter the goal of the Ghana Shared Growth and Development Agenda.

Some indicators for the evaluation will include:

*The achievement of project objectives or target.
*Accessibility of output to beneficiaries.
*The number of beneficiaries.
*Gender disaggregation of beneficiaries