A number of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) operating in the three regions of the north, have undergone a two-day intensive capacity building workshop in Tamale, spearheaded by the African Centre for Parliamentary Affairs (ACEPA).<\/p>\n
These include the Centre for Active Leaning and Development (CALID), Songtaba, Urbanet, NORSAAC, Grameen-Ghana, Partnership for Rural Development (PRUDA), TradeAID, NORPRA and CODAC.<\/p>\n
The Executive Director of ACEPA, Dr. Rashid Draman, on the sidelines in a Citi News\u00a0<\/strong>interview, said the workshop funded by the French government under its CSOs strengthening programme sought to equip the participants on how to engage Parliament.<\/p>\n \u201cParliament is a very conservative institution, and we don\u2019t want civil society groups to just get up and go and start making noise and in the process the messages are lost, and so we wanted to ensure that there is a constructive way of engagement.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe wanted to ensure that there are proper mechanisms of engagement so that these groups when they get up and they want to engage, at least they know what to say and they know how to focus on the issues that are important and they know how to engage the members of Parliament.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe hope that when they go back they will carry the message back to their platforms and be the ambassadors of this innovative programme because this is one of a kind in terms of activities we have done to engage Parliament,\u201d he stressed.<\/p>\n He tasked the participants to take advantage of the workshop to network and form synergies with the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and individual Legislators.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are silent voices and they are doing a lot of good work in this part of our country, and most of the time the work that they do ends up just sitting here; it doesn\u2019t get any attention at the national level.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo we thought that it was very important to begin to see how we can connect what they are doing to the policy process because at the end of the day you can do a lot of good work here, but those who have to say yes or no to the policy, the budget and the law are not aware of what they are doing, and so we thought these kinds of conversations are very important.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Rashid Draman guaranteed that the workshop would be sustained against the backdrop that there were local partners including Care International and NORSAAC on the ground to ensure its sustainability.<\/p>\n He emphasized the need for the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs to constructively engage Civil Society Organizations across the country at all levels of the decision making processes.<\/p>\n Some of the participants lauded ACEPA\u2019s initiative and promised to sustain it at the grassroots.<\/p>\n They said the engagement enlightened and re-positioned them to be more proactive in engaging Parliament going forward.<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n By: Abdul Karim Naatogmah\/citifmonline.com\/Ghana<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A number of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) operating in the three regions of the north, have undergone a two-day intensive capacity building workshop in Tamale, spearheaded by the African Centre for Parliamentary Affairs (ACEPA). These include the Centre for Active Leaning and Development (CALID), Songtaba, Urbanet, NORSAAC, Grameen-Ghana, Partnership for Rural Development (PRUDA), TradeAID, NORPRA […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":374387,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[58],"tags":[5427,3,10612],"yoast_head":"\n