DECENTRALIZED PLANNING AND POVERTY ALLEVIATION IN THE LAWRA DISTRICT OF THE UPPER WEST REGION OF GHANA

Decentralized Planning has been described as Ghana's third policy objective to its decentralization programme (Kumbour, 2010). This is referred mostly in literature as the "bottom up" Development Planning which is described as a departure from previous Planning methods also described as the "top down" approach. The main objective of the bottom up strategy to Development Planning is to involve communities in the plan preparation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. The essence of this practice is to create a sense of community ownership among community members to ensure the sustainability of development interventions in the form of projects and programmes. Due to the inability of successive Governments to reduce poverty to an appreciable rate, many methods have been adopted to ensure that the lives of the people are better off after the introduction and implementation of some Development interventions. The top-down approach of implementing projects has not received much positive results with regards to poverty alleviation especially in the Lawra District. This has resulted in a methodological shift in the Planning and implementation process to take the form of bottom-up. The top down approach to Planning took the form of ministries and agencies based in the major towns and cities whose personnel probably did not have an idea about the practical situations of communities planning for the socio-economic Development of the communities. This resulted In the marginalization of the rural folks in the Planning process and hence projects and programmes implemented did not have much impact on the lives of the people. However, the new Planning approach introduced was to correct the above anomalies in the system, so that, implemented projects and programmes will have much impact in terms of poverty alleviation. The bottom-up approach seeks to give much Planning authority to the grass-root populace in deciding their path of Development and playing major roles in project planning and implementation. With this approach, decisions are no more to originate from the National level and descend to the community level, but rather from the community level to the National level. The reasons for the failure of the top-down Planning process according to some theorist include the following: the insensitivity of projects and programmes to the community needs and aspirations for local Development; also, it represented a parochial approach to alleviating poverty as all stakeholders especially community members were not part of the Planning process and lastly, the unwillingness of communities to sustain projects and programmes because the implemented interventions were seen not to be their priority needs. In view of the failure of this earlier Planning system to improve the living standards of the citizenry, the new Decentralized Planning system (bottom-up) was then introduced and sought to achieve the following: Restructure the various ministries and departments and devolve their authority especially to take decisions for local Governments who are nearer to the people and understand their priority needs and aspirations. To ensure the active involvement of the community and service providers in the prOVISIon of services, and the Planning and implementation of Development programmes, and lastly to effect adequate transfer of revenue, staff and other resources from central to local Government.