Publication: Decentralization and Governance in the Ghana Health Sector
Date
2012
ISSN
Published
2012
Author(s)
Couttolenc, Bernard F.
Abstract
In recent years, many countries, both
developed and developing, have engaged in a process of
decentralization of health service delivery and/or other
functions of the health system. In most cases,
decentralization has been adopted to improve accountability
to local population, efficiency in service provision, equity
in access and resource distribution, or to increase resource
mobilization. Ghana has a long history of local government,
going back to pre-independence times of the nineteenth
century. By 1859 Municipal Councils were established in the
major coastal towns of the then Gold Coast. Native
Authorities, Councils and Courts were also established to
administer law and order under the indirect authority of the
colonial government; the limitations of this system was
repeatedly put forward in the 1930s and 1940s, and reforms
were introduced in 1951 by the Local Government Ordinance
(Ahwoi 2010). The government has embarked in a
decentralization policy since independence, which was
strengthened and amplified by the local government act of
1993 and other legislations. At the present the Government
of Ghana (GOG) is committed to strengthen the implementation
of decentralization and for that purpose revise and
strengthen the policy and regulatory framework governing
decentralization. In spite of this long history and
successive waves of decentralization reforms, effective
decentralization in the country still faces considerable
challenges, especially in large social sectors involving
large structures. The public health sector is one that has
not fully embraced the decentralization model adopted by the
GOG, decentralization by devolution to the districts, for a
number of reasons that will be discussed in this report.
Some functions and responsibilities have been decentralized,
but others remain centralized or simply deconcentrated.
Citation
“Couttolenc, Bernard F.. 2012. Decentralization and Governance in the Ghana Health Sector. A World Bank study. © Washington, DC: World Bank. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/65e1e2fb-3baf-5470-a514-8d434b1672b2 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”