The Government Assurances Committee of Parliament on Monday re-launched ?www.assurances.gov.gh?, an online digital platform project to facilitate the Committee?s mandate of monitoring all assurances and promises by the Executive made on the floor of Parliament.
The project engages citizens to amplify their voices on the platform on promises made by Ministers to ensure accountability.
The project christened ?Connecting Citizens to Parliament,? is in collaboration with Penplusbytes, started last year with funding from STAR-Ghana as a pilot project last year.
With the re-launching, it is now scaled up with technical and financial support from the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), to reach more people.
The platform is integrated with Mobile App, SMS and social media and was developed with clear focus on the needs of the end users, and a vision to ensure that citizens are able to engage with parliament to monitor the implementation of government assurances and actively participate in the process of assessing government and hold it more accountable via an innovative, easy to use, interactive online platform.
Mr Emmanuel Bedzrah, the Chairman of the Committee, and MP for Ho West, said the work of the committee in ensuring accountable governance had been further boosted by the inclusion of technology in their activity.
He said the platform presented a new way of engaging the citizenry, adding that the committee was the first in Parliament to go digital.
He said the committee had the mandate to follow any minister who made any promise or pledges on the floor of Parliament or before any committee without referral by the Speaker.
“Citizen engagement is vital to the survival of democracy in current democratic dispensation; any government that wants to survive its mandate must engage those who elected them,” Mr Bedzrah said.
Mr. Jerry Sam, Project Director at Penplusbytes said the “Connecting citizens to Parliament” project had successfully enabled CGA and key stakeholders to actively keep track of key government promises in the last year.
He said they had expanded the array of avenues that citizens could engage using short code 9030, mobile app admin.assurance. gov.gh /mobil, as well as social media tools such as Facebook www.facebook.com/govassurancesgh, and Twitter@govassurance .gov.gh.
He was hopeful Penplusbytes would consolidate the vitality of the interaction between Parliament and citizens with more effective tracking of assurances that would be followed up by the committee to provide feedback to citizens.
Togbe Kwami Ahiabenu, an IT and governance expert, said action beyond feedback is needed for the effective implementation of Government assurances.
The Committee on Government Assurances (CGA) is a Standing Committee of Parliament, created by the standing Orders in 1998 to exercise oversight responsibility over the Executive.
Order 174 (2) of the Standing Orders of Parliament indicates that it shall be the duty of the Committee on Government Assurances to pursue all assurances, promises and undertaking given by Ministers from time to time.
It shall also be the function of the Committee to report to the House on the extent to which such assurances have been fulfilled.
GNA
