Ghana National Action Plan

Implementation Structure

1. GHANAP 2 presents a three-tiered implementing structure, national, security sector, and local, that appears comprehensive on paper. The National Steering Committee (NSC) draws from key ministries, civil society and development partners, suggesting broad institutional buy-in. However, the structure is architectural rather than functional. It provides no convening schedule, no quorum requirements, no dispute resolution mechanism and no consequences for non-participation. Critically, the absence of an inter-ministerial steering committee was identified as a key failure of GHANAP 1 on page 6. GHANAP 2 creates the NSC to address this, but without the operational mechanisms that would make it functional, it risks repeating the same failure under a different name. 2. The MoGCSP is designated as the lead coordinating ministry. Yet the document openly acknowledges on page 6 that the ministry receives chronically low budget allocations from the Ministry of Finance, whose funding is spread thinly across competing priorities. A ministry that cannot secure adequate funding for its own operations is being asked to coordinate institutions with significantly greater political weight such as the Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There is no binding commitment mechanism compelling these more powerful ministries to prioritise GHANAP 2 implementation. The coordinating ministry is structurally the weakest actor in the coordination chain. 3. One of the most revealing structural features of GHANAP 2 is visible from the Acknowledgements page. The document was technically developed and financially supported by UNDP, WANEP, the Canadian High Commission and WPSI-KAIPTC, led by an independent development practitioner. Yet implementation responsibility rests entirely with government ministries that had no financial stake in the document's development. The people who built the NAP will not implement it. The people implementing it did not build it. This divorce between authorship and ownership is the quiet structural explanation for why GHANAP 1 was never fully implemented and why GHANAP 2 risks the same fate. 4. The local level of the implementing structure lists MMDAs, CSOs, CBOs, and Traditional and Religious Leaders as responsible for community-based activities. However, these actors are receivers of mandates from above, not co-designers of the plan. There is no evidence that communities in the conflict-affected areas explicitly named in the document, Dagbon, Alavanyo, Nkonya, Bimbila, were consulted in designing the activities meant to serve them. Local actors are expected to carry out a plan they had no hand in shaping. This is implementation without ownership, which is a fundamental barrier to sustainability and relevance. 5. Civil society's treatment in the implementing structure is one of the NAP's most significant missed opportunities. Organisations including WANEP, WILPF Ghana and WPSI-KAIPTC are credited on page 5 with developing the document. Yet in the implementing structure they are reduced to a single generic seat on the NSC and a blanket listing alongside CBOs at the local level. More fundamentally, the NAP fails entirely to acknowledge the WPS work that civil society organisations are already doing in Ghana. Existing programmes, community relationships, trained personnel and accumulated knowledge are nowhere mapped or referenced. This erasure is both a shame and a lost opportunity as it prevents the NAP from building on existing foundations, excludes a ready implementation infrastructure and creates a coordination vacuum between government and civil society programming. The organisations that know most about WPS on the ground in Ghana helped write this document. The document does not use what they know. 6. The review and accountability mechanism runs in one direction, upward to the President through MoGCSP, and outward to the international UNSCR 1325 anniversary commemoration on 31st October each year. Annual progress reports are presented to the President. Findings circulate within elite institutional circles. There is no structured mechanism for communities affected by Ghana's security challenges to receive findings, question implementation, or make corrections. The Parliamentary Select Committee on Gender and Children, which could provide horizontal accountability, is acknowledged on page 6 as rarely raising WPS issues on the floor of parliament. The NAP therefore has no functional downward accountability to the women it is meant to serve. This is not accountability, it is reporting. 7. The progress measurement architecture has a foundational flaw. No baselines are established anywhere in the document, yet targets are set throughout: reduce reported cases by 30%, increase women in peacebuilding by 30%, ensure 40% female participation in decision making. Without establishing current figures, these targets are arithmetically meaningless. This structural absence means the end-of-term evaluation in year five has no reference point against which to definitively determine success or failure. Beyond the baseline problem, most indicators measure outputs rather than outcomes, counting activities, training numbers and awareness campaigns rather than measuring whether women's peace and security actually improved. The M&E framework is therefore structurally incapable of producing a finding of failure, which makes it equally incapable of driving genuine accountability. 8. Several of the NAP's commitments reveal a gap between ambition and institutional reality that the implementing structure never bridges. The commitment to ensuring 30% public awareness of the NAP and WPS instruments assigns this task to the MoGCSP and NGOs. The National Commission for Civic Education, Ghana's constitutionally mandated public education body with district-level reach across the entire country, is nowhere mentioned in the document. The commitment to establishing shelters and rehabilitation centres provides no inventory of what currently exists, making it impossible to measure what has been added. Most importantly, commitment to strengthen women's capacity to resist violence locates responsibility in potential victims rather than in the state. This attaches an indicator measuring reporting rates which measures trust in institutions rather than the empowerment the objective claims to pursue. In each case, the target exists without the institutional architecture needed to achieve it. Taken together, these findings reveal an implementing structure that performs the grammar of a results-oriented national plan without the substance of one. The structure is drawn but not operationalised. The targets are set but not anchored in data. The accountability runs toward power rather than toward people. And the civil society organisations with the deepest knowledge and the most relevant existing work are acknowledged at the beginning and sidelined thereafter. GHANAP 2's implementing structure was designed to satisfy the expectations of donors and international reviewers. It was not designed to be held accountable by the women of Dagbon, Alavanyo, Nkonya or Bimbila, whose names appear in the Background section and nowhere else. (pp. 5-6, 14-20)