The District Assembly Common Fund and Fiscal Decentralisation: What is the Impact on Local Development in Ghana?

Abstract

Local governments have been created as agents of local development in which the people in the local areas are given greater opportunities to influence policies and programs that directly affect their well-being and thereby reducing their poverty levels. But the implementation of the policies and programmes is bedeviled with many problems. Key among them is the issue of financing the local development projects in order to reduce rural poverty. The government of Ghana attempted to reduce this problem when it introduced a development fund in1994 known as the – District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) to encourage local governance and deepen Government’s commitment to decentralization in general and fiscal devolution in particular. The study therefore, seeks to assess the impact of District Assembly Common Fund on Local Government Development in the Adaklu District Assembly in the Volta Region of Ghana. The study mainly adopted qualitative methods of research to obtain information on the experiences of the poor people in the Adaklu communities selected as study areas. Interview guides were used to obtain information from the people in the communities, staff of the Assembly and some heads of the decentralized departments. A major finding of the study is that the assembly did not involve the rural people in the poverty reduction programmes in the district.