Dr Callitus Mahama, Head of Local Government Service (LGS), on Thursday urged citizens to hold local authorities accountable in the provision of improved social services as a way of strengthening the decentralisation process.
He said it is the mandate for Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) to provide basic social services such as transport, water, education, health and sanitation and not the central government.
Dr Mahama who was speaking at a day?s sensitisation workshop for the media and the Local Governance Network, a civil society group on the LGS Service Delivery Standards (SDS) for MMDAs, said the amount of energy people use on the airwaves to criticise central government should be redirected to the local authorities to keep them in check.
The SDS developed and approved by the LGS Council for adoption by the MMDAs are Participation, Professionalism, Client Focus, Transparency, Efficient and Efficient and Effective use of Resources, and Accountability.
These standards define minimum levels of services that the LGS should provide and what service recipients should expect in terms of quantity, quality, time and cost as well as the minimum cost implications for providing services.
It would also empower service recipients and communities to demand the services that are due them at the appropriate standards; provide a basis upon which feedback on the level of satisfaction against the standard criteria could be evaluated.
It also aimed at providing uniformity and consistency in the provision of services at the local levels and serve as a guide for the MMDAs and their Departments to deliver quality service to the citizenry in accordance with the provisions of the LGS Act, 2003 (Act 656).
The Act enjoins the LGS to set performance standards within which the district assemblies and regional coordinating councils (RCC) shall carry out their functions and discharge their duties, as well as monitoring and evaluating their performance standards.
Dr Mahama said the standards would be the basis for promotions as well as assessing performance of staff in the MMDAs to ensure quality, efficient and cost effective delivery of service to the citizenry.
He commended stakeholders, especially the European Union and DANIDA for their immense collaboration and support in the development of the SDS.
Mrs Mabel Amoako-Atta, the Consultant, said in this era of resource constraint, amid numerous development needs and expectations, it is crucial to develop transparent and acceptable minimum values to guide both the delivery of services to the citizenry and the expectations that the citizenry have of the public service.
?To measure their level of trust in local governments and subsequently the satisfaction they will derive from public services delivered, community members generally expect to be certain about the quality, processes, time, frequency and cost of such services offered to them.
?They also expect to know clearly what redress mechanisms they can resort to, whenever service delivered to them are either not satisfactory or not acceptable,? she said.
She said the SDS together with their measurements and monitoring indicators and mechanisms were developed and documented with inputs from key stakeholders from RCCs, MMDAs NGOs, CSOs and the public Services Commission at a series of zonal workshops.
Mrs Amoako-Atta said outputs emanating from all zonal workshops and which culminated in the formulation of the service delivery standards were validated by the stakeholders in a participatory manner.
She noted that for SDS to be adhered to and operationalised to yield the expected benefits to the citizenry, stakeholders therefore need to have a common understanding of their definition and measurement indicators.
?Also crucial are the strategies and institutional frame work as well as the time frame for effecting the standards,? she added.
She said to improve service delivery to the citizenry, it is vital to establish, manage, measure and monitor the effectiveness of the SDS.
