Every four years, Ghana’s District Assemblies invest significant time, energy, and public resources into crafting their District Medium-Term Development Plans (MTDPs). These documents are intended to be strategic roadmaps—locally driven frameworks that guide development priorities at the sub-national level in alignment with national goals and global aspirations like the SDGs and Agenda 2063.
But as we move closer to the next planning cycle, it is time to confront a difficult truth: our MTDPs are failing to live up to their promise. Despite their technical polish and procedural rigour, they often remain inaccessible to local people, overly ambitious in scope, and insufficiently transformative in impact.
1. Overengineered but Under-implemented
District Assemblies, led by their Planning Coordinating Units, go through elaborate processes to produce MTDPs—conducting community consultations, stakeholder validation meetings, and volumes of situation analyses. Yet, these plans frequently suffer from implementation fatigue. Why?
Because many MTDPs read like wish lists, packed with tall orders of projects and activities that far outstrip the financial and human resources available. Roads, clinics, markets, irrigation dams, and digital centres are all squeezed into a single document with little prioritization. The result? A bloated plan, impressive on paper, but practically hollow.
Worse still, districts often receive unpredictable and insufficient transfers from the central government. Internally generated funds (IGF) remain meagre. And donor dependency undermines long-term sustainability. Ambition is good—but without realism and prioritization, it sets districts up for failure and citizen disappointment.
2. A Short-Term Planning Trap
The four-year planning cycle also needs rethinking. While it aligns with political timelines, it is too short to deliver meaningful transformation—especially for structural problems like youth unemployment, environmental degradation, spatial inequality, or health infrastructure deficits. By the time implementation frameworks are finalized and procurement begins, it’s almost time to write a new plan.
What Ghana needs is a dual-track planning model: a longer-term strategic vision (10–15 years), accompanied by flexible, rolling medium-term implementation plans that are regularly reviewed and adapted. This will help districts stay focused on transformative change while remaining responsive to new challenges.
3. Technocratic Plans, Excluded People
Another major flaw lies in how the plans are communicated—or rather, not communicated. MTDPs are written in dense, technocratic language, often inaccessible to the very people they are meant to serve. Many community members do not know what’s in their district plan, let alone how to hold leaders accountable for its implementation.
Planning should be democratic. Yet, the use of bureaucratic jargon, thick planning matrices, and abstract indicators excludes ordinary residents, traditional authorities, and civil society from meaningful engagement. The result is participatory planning in theory, but elite-driven planning in practice.
4. Projectized Thinking, Not Systemic Change
Too many MTDPs reflect a projectized, checklist mindset—focused on building “things” rather than transforming systems. A new classroom block is a project. But a transformative plan would ask: how do we radically improve basic education outcomes across the district? It would tackle teacher absenteeism, learning materials, girl-child retention, inclusive pedagogy, and education financing.
Similarly, while many districts propose markets and feeder roads, few go further to redesign their local economies, support agroecological value chains, create decent work for youth, or strengthen local production systems. This points to a deeper issue: MTDPs often lack political imagination. They’re administrative outputs, not visionary strategies.
5. Weak Monitoring, Little Accountability
Despite NDPC’s standardized planning formats, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) remain a weak link in most districts. Many MTDPs fail to establish clear indicators, realistic targets, or baseline data. Progress reports, if they exist, are rarely discussed with the public. Citizens cannot track what was promised versus what was delivered.
Meanwhile, audit reports reveal recurring inefficiencies, ghost projects, and procurement irregularities—symptoms of a system where planning is disconnected from transparent implementation.
What Must Change?
If MTDPs are to become more than just paper exercises, Ghana must urgently reform its sub-national planning system. Here are a few starting points:
Introduce a 10–15-Year District Development Vision: Pair medium-term action plans with a long-term strategy that provides continuity across political cycles. Enforce Prioritization and Budget-Activity Matching: Require districts to realistically cost their MTDPs and prioritize no more than 3–5 transformative goals. Simplify Plans for Public Use: Produce popular versions of MTDPs in local languages, using infographics and audio-visual tools to foster public ownership. Build Transformative Capacity in Planning Teams: Train planners not just in project management, but in systems thinking, participatory methods, and inclusive development. Link Plans to Performance and Accountability: Tie DCEs’ performance reviews to delivery on MTDP goals and create citizen scorecards for public evaluation. Institutionalize Participatory Monitoring: Empower local watchdogs, civil society, and community-based organizations to track and report on MTDP implementation.
Conclusion
Ghana’s District MTDPs need more than compliance—they need courage, clarity, and creativity. Development is not about how many projects a district can list, but about how deeply it can transform the lives of its people. To achieve this, we must move beyond rigid, overambitious planning toward people-cantered, visionary, and implementable strategies that endure beyond election cycles. Let us not spend another planning cycle doing more of the same. Let us build a local governance system where plans don’t just look good—they work.
The writer is a trained Development Planner, Sustainability Researcher and Research Fellow of the Bureau of Integrated Rural Development (BIRD), Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. Ghana. His email address is: [email protected]
