Tema-Ghana, Oct 31 – At the Regional Advocacy Meeting, which takes place from November 6–8, the Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition (GACC) will collaborate with its counterparts from Sierra Leone and Benin to generate ideas on how to counteract corruption’s devastating impacts on healthcare and education in West Africa.
GACC’s communications assistant, Miss Pamela Laourou, informed reporters in Tema that Open Society Africa was providing funding for the summit, which was scheduled to take place in Benin.
The initiative, “Uniting Constituencies to Fight Corruption in Health and Education in West Africa,” which focuses on Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Benin, she added, included it.
According to Miss Laourou, the Regional Advocacy Meeting was a crucial part of the anti-corruption campaign. Its objectives were to include important players, disseminate project results, and obtain commitments from institutions at the regional and national levels.
Its main objective, according to her, is to promote integrity and openness in public procurement in the West African healthcare and education sectors.
She said that public procurement procedures for healthcare and education entail large sums of money on a worldwide scale, and she added that corruption frequently afflicts these procedures, resulting in increased costs and reduced services, particularly in low- and middle-income nations.
According to her, “corruption in education results in inadequate infrastructure and reduced educational quality, while in healthcare procurement it causes medicine shortages and inflated drug prices.”
By the end of the meeting, it was anticipated that relevant stakeholders would have a thorough understanding of the project’s goals and achievements and that their commitment to tackling public procurement concerns in healthcare and education throughout West Africa would have been established.
Miss Laourou stated that the goal of this group endeavour is to protect everyone’s access to basic healthcare and education by promoting open procurement practises across the region.
The National Public Procurement Authorities, the Anti-Corruption Commission, the African Parliamentarians Network against Corruption (APNAC), the World Bank-West Africa office, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), civil society organisations, and media outlets are among the important organisations from the three nations that are anticipated to be represented at the meeting.
