Parliament’s Assurance Committee has re-launched a digital platform to help facilitate its work in deepening democracy in Ghana.
The platform, www.assurances.gov.gh is to complement and enhance the committee’s engagement with the public.
The project was executed in collaboration with Penplusbytes with support from the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).
“The Connecting Citizens to Parliament” project is set to boost the capacity of the Committee on one hand and citizens on the other hand by increasing and closing feedback loops via SMS web-platform, mobile app as well as social media tools,” the organisers stated.
Chairman of the committee, Emmanuel Bedzera who did the re-launch said the website would help the committee to interact with the citizenry in executing its core mandate of pursuing all assurances, promises given by government appointees on the floor of parliament.
According to him, the project which started as a pilot last year with funding from STAR-Ghana is now scaled up to reach more citizens with technical and financial support from OSIWA.
He said the project will bring together stakeholders such as Members of Parliament, government officials, ordinary citizens, CSOs, and the media to the table using digital platform with the hope that there will be fruitful deliberations on how collectively democracy can be made to work for Ghana through closing the feedback loop.
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 on 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 an effective tracking of assurances that would be followed up by the committee to provide feedback to citizens.
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.
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