A Development Economist and a Senior Lecturer at the University for Development Studies(UDS) Dr Michael Ayamga-Adongo has stated that founders and workers of some non-governmental organizations operating in Northern Ghana deliberately falsify information about the area and the impact they( NGOs) are making in the lives of their beneficiaries and divert funds from donors for their personal use.
Dr. Ayamga-Adongo explained that such NGOs hire experts and prevail upon them to make recommendations for more funding, which sadly are not put into really positively impacting the lives of their beneficiaries but into the building of hotels and guest houses that serve as meeting grounds for the NGOs themselves.
“I got to realize the billions of dollars that come into Ghana through NGOs in the name of developing Northern Ghana.
These NGOs take the money and their owners use it to build Hotels and then hire reputable scholars to do the evaluation. When you write the report, they will review it, change the content to reflect an impact they never made.
They will nudge you to make recommendations for more projects and the cycle continues.
I have seen presentations that create the impression that in Northern Ghana, one encounters at least 5 cases of female genital mutilation in every other community.
Most of the NGOs still push the poverty reduction agenda instead of the societal transformation through wealth creation agenda because the former allows access to resources for workshops and conferences in hotels and guest houses owned by staff of NGOs,” he revealed.
He asserted that in such hotels and guest houses owned by operators of NGOs, numerous conferences and workshops are held with no real impact on the people.
“Everywhere you turn in Northern Ghana. In every corner of the Upper East you find hotels and guests houses and in these hotels and guests houses, the poverty of northern Ghana is created,” he lamented.
His comments come in the wake of claims by Ms Rita Etornam Sey, founder of NGO Inspire Today Foundation that girls in some parts of Northern Ghana resort to using clay as substitutes for sanitary pads due to extreme poverty and deprivation. The claim has predictably angered many persons from Northern Ghana who have called her out for peddling falsehood to curry favour from donors.
Source: MyNewsGh.com
