Decentralisation and local economic development promotion at the district level in Ghana

Abstract

The paper seeks to examine the contribution of Ghana’s decentralisation process to local economic development (LED) promotion by assessing the roles played by local governments in the LED process. It came to light that local governments support LED through municipal development planning and implementation, provision of infrastructure, land use planning and physical development permitting, provision of extension services, training programmes and skills provision. It was also revealed that there exist challenges such as weak institutional set-up and inadequate capacity for LED promotion within the local governments. Moreover, the LED interventions as applied by the local governments are limited in scope and there is little integration of the LED process into the local level planning process. Finally, the absence of a national and local level policy framework to guide LED promotion affects the focus of the local governments in LED promotion.