Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in Ghana are advocating a new aid effectiveness model that would ultimately reduce poverty.

They say this can be done when government is obliged to integrate gender equality in programmes with clear indicators and implementation dates, secure the livelihoods of local procedures through the use of protection instrument and promote environmental protection.

The CSOs recognize that aid effectiveness is threatened because it is still prevalent in the political economy; governments and donors are not accountable to citizens and development policies are not entirely country owned and country-led.

They therefore called on government to introduce more mechanisms to enable citizens to hold public officials to account for the use of public funds, engage in a more rigorous fight against corruption and create equal space for civil society participation in policy making, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.

The resolution comes after a study conducted by the CSOs on aid funded projects in education, gender budgeting, civil society , the multi donor budget support process, labour and parliament in 30 districts.

The study identified that the current funding arrangements under the Paris Declaration restrict CSO's ability to access funds and place low value on issues such as gender equality, environmental sustainability, poverty reduction and promotion of local production.

At a press briefing by the group, Dr. Yao Graham, Executive Director of Third World Network (TWN) noted that aid forum is important to Ghana not because it will be held here, but because it has a lot of bearing on the country's development agenda. "Development effectiveness is the primary criterion of aid effectiveness."

As a prelude to the event, a CSO parallel conference on aid will be held from August 31 to September 1 to push for the recognition of their work in development as well as the voice of the ordinary citizens in the discussions.

Mrs. Bernice Sam, National Program Coordinator of the Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF), said Ghanaian CSOs will use the forum to make policy documents more reader friendly, and if possible produce versions in local languages to empower local governments to take decisions at the local level.

"We have identified some emerging issues like lack of flexibility in aid conditionality, the continuous use of technical assistance without regard to skills and expertise, continued misalignment between donors' agenda and domestic development priorities and many others".

She emphasized that the effectiveness of aid is its development impact, which is a real change in the lives and rights of millions of people affected by poverty and inequality.