Special topics
Jacqueline P. Parditey
Starting on Thursday 17th September 2015, the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) is holding a two-day residential training course for CSO’s working or interested in working within Ghana’s extractives sector to help leverage their extensive knowledge and experience for improved extractive sector governance, at Mensvic Hotel in Accra.
There is ample evidence pointing towards the absence of proper planning for spending extractive revenues both at the National and subnational level. A striking factor for this menace is lack of coordination between agencies and ministries who provide extractive data. The training programme, themed ‘’Catalysing Open Data for Extractive” (CODEX), aims at improving the capacity of extractives data personnel to mitigate the alarming challenge of effective accountability.
NRGI’s catalyzing open data for extractives programme will look to develop international open data standard to great transparency and accountability around Government revenue from extractive industries in Ghana by taking think tanks through hands-on training in extractive data analysis using open format tools such as excel.
The key objectives of the program is to introduce to participants the power of open data and its potential to enable greater understanding and data use, to present participants with hand-on skills on extractive data analysis within the context of Ghana through demonstration using GHEITI reports for analysis and to educate participants on other extractive open data projects in Ghana and beyond.
Day two of the training would be a forum where CSO’s, government, research institution and international development agencies would present on their existing or planned data projects relating to extractive. The objective for this forum is to bring together different extractive stakeholders from Government, media and CSO’s and research institution to discuss and showcase various extractive data projects in Ghana. Different agencies would be given the opportunity to talk about extractive data projects or initiative that they manage or co-manage in Ghana and beyond.
About 30 civil society organizations will take part in this course. Trainers for the program will be drawn from the Institute, who will be assisted by some Government agencies. They will present concrete examples of extractive data use within government and help participants plan and design a database to enhance work. The training will be divided into 4 sessions with interesting topic. Speakers includes Samuel Bekoe, Emmanuel Kuyole and Mark Evans, who will lead in extensive discussion on Ghana’s Fiscal Regime and Revenue management in Extractive sector. CSO’s such as ACEP, IBIS, PIAC is expected to participant in the course.