By Mercy Darko
The World Bank is committing 155 million dollars to help Ghana implement the West Africa Coastal Areas Resilience Investment Project phase 2 (WACA ResIP 2). The 5-year project which will be spearheaded 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.
At a stakeholder engagement with Civil Society Groups, CSOs at Sogakope, the Environmental Management Specialist for the WACA project, Dr. Memuna Mattah explained that Ghana recently joined the program after some success stories recorded in countries that took part in phase 1. She indicated that Ghana in collaboration with the Gambia and Guinea Bissua makes up phase two of the project which kicked off in March this year, will pull resources together to help address coastal pollution, flooding and erosion while protecting the lives and properties. She noted that Ghana will leverage experiences from other countries to ensure a successful implementation of the project
“This project has been put in place to assist West African countries that are within the coastline to address issues that are affecting communities within the coastal areas, such as pollution, erosion, flooding, which are also common with almost all the countries that are within the coastline. You know, one country cannot just do that. So this WACA project came as a result of discussions between these countries Ghana, Gambia and Guinea Bissua to see how resources can be harnessed to assist these countries.
It started years ago, where some countries, like six countries, have already signed up to the program, such as Togo, Benin, Cote d’Ivoire and Mauritania among others. So having seen that these countries are making some progress and then also success stories, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, and the Gambia also signed up for the second phase, which is the RECIP-2. It is a West Africa program, and it is an investment to bring about resilience among
the coastal communities, and it is also to help address coastal issues, 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 when you are going to implement a project, because it has to do with communities and also human beings, there are grievances and there will be issues. So the grievance redress mechanism manual has also been developed, which is in place and then we are operationalizing the manual, or the content of the manual, so that when the infrastructural development begins, grievances of people will be addressed. So all these structures, too, have been put in place”, she added.
The support from the World Bank comprises a loan of 150 million dollars and a 5million grant. To this end, Civil Society Groups, CSOs have been attached to this project to ensure transparency and accountability. 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 the fact that this is a loan facilitated to the states, and its management should accord with certain standards. That is not to say that the government implementing agencies are not able. It is not an indictment on the government institutions, however, it is just part of the participatory aspect of achieving development democracy”.
“So it is just to ensure that we are all doing what has to be done in the utilization of the fund that benefits the states and the citizens. We have csos with different expertise so we have segregated them around those lines for which different groupings participated the project at different levels so we have had engagements in terms of capacity building understanding the project itself understanding the differential rules of csos in order to classify them to work on the project because the project has different levels of intervention some are highly scientific and so we need csos with that kind of background some are social oriented and all that you may know of so we have tried to tease out those with those expertise to engage the project”, he added.
The WACA project is coastal resilience initiative with earlier assessments showing certain hotspots in six Districts in the Greater Accra and Volta region. Some communities that will benefit from the project include all three coastal communities in the Volta region, that is Ketu Municipal Assembly, South Tongu and Aflao. Areas in the Greater Accra region include the Accra Metropolitan Assembly specifically around the Korle Lagoon, Glefe, Krokrobite, Bortianor and Langma which have seen coastal erosion due to climate change. The project which has four components seeks to among other things strengthen regional integration, strengthen policy and institutional frameworks, strengthen national physical and social investment and project management or national coordination. The project comprises 9 countries with six countries 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.
