July 11, 2003
By Amos Safo
Accra (http://allafrica.com/stories/200307140103.html)
THE ISODEC WAY
The mode of operations of Non Governmental
Organizations (NGOs) in Ghana and the Sub region has
taken on a new face, following the change in structure
and tactics by the Integrated Social Development
Centre (ISODEC).
At 20, ISODEC could be considered as a young
institution, but its achievements so far have outpaced
its two decades of existence. Formed in 1983 in the
heat of the economic down turn in Ghana, ISODEC
started providing basic services like water, health,
basic education and other human rights needs in
deprived communities.
ISODEC grew out of four years of voluntary work of
its founding members in Nima-Mamoobi, one of Accra's
largest low-income settlements. Its founding members
provided support services to a community organisation,
the Nima- 441 Welfare Association, which helped to
mobilise the community to secure their right to clean
water, sanitation, maternal and child care and good
secular education for neglected Muslim children.
The Nima- 441 Welfare Association remains active to
date. Similarly, the early struggles for equal
education for Muslim children gave birth, in part, to
the Muslim Relief Association of Ghana (MURAG), which
also continues to date to work for education of Muslim
children in close collaboration with ISODEC.
Once formalised, ISODEC extended into rural water,
building upon the work of some of its founding
members. It is perhaps in the area of rural water
policy that ISODEC may have made its greatest impact.
Together with Water Aid, a British NGO, which ISODEC
hosted and provided capacity and technical support for
5 years, the "Mole Series" was, initiated together
with key players in the rural water sector to debate
policies affecting the sector. "Mole" contributed, and
still contributes, to substantial shift in public
resources allocation from urban into rural water and
the introduction of community-management systems for
rural water.
ISODEC's current work in water has shifted back to
the urban sector where it now focuses on research on
the possible impact of privatisation of urban water
systems on the right of poor people to clean and
affordable water. The privatisation issue is
vigorously pioneered also by "Public Agenda", the
weekly issue-based newspaper that ISODEC set up and
continues to support.
In Kumasi, ISODEC established the Cedi Finance
Foundation (CFF) to mobilize funds from small-scale
businessmen/women, petty traders, porters (kayayees)
and shoeshine boys and in turn give them credit to
expand their businesses. The Acting Executive Director
of ISODEC, Bishop Akolgo explains that CFF was formed
to disprove the wrong notion that urban women cannot
be organized into credit unions. It was also to
disprove the argument that credit without collateral
security cannot be given to the poor. He said, " on
the contrary the recovery is very high among the
poor."
The Bawku East Small Scale Farmers Association
Rural Bank (BESSFA) is a partnership between ISODEC
and some rural women in Bawku. The bank was
established to grant loans without collateral security
to women farmers, who are mostly the breadwinners in
their communities. According to Akolgo the primary aim
of the bank is to prove a point that it is possible
for women to own and run their own bank. As majority
shareholders of the bank, the women have held the bank
together this far.
Moving towards rights-based advocacy
Between 1994 and December 1999, ISODEC hosted the
Africa Secretariat of the Third World Network (TWN).
Managed by a unified management team, the two
organisations worked in complementality. ISODEC
provided the "rootedness" to TWN's largely global
policy and research focus. ISODEC progressively built
the foundations of its advocacy work, taking advantage
of the TWN programme of work.
Joint research on the impacts of gold mining on the
rights of affected communities gave rise to two
institutions: the African Initiative on Mining and
Society (AIMS), a regional network facilitated to TWN,
and the Centre for Public Interest Law (CEPIL), a
network of lawyers providing pro-bono legal and
organisational support to communities negatively
affected by mining, established by ISODEC. Side by
side, ISODEC expanded its field presence in Ghana in
such substantive areas as girl-child education,
reproductive health and rights, piloting of community
management systems for rural water and micro-finance.
In this period, ISODEC intensified coalition
building with a wide range of civil society
organisations; the trade union movement, the
journalists association, the Christian organisations,
teachers organisations, Muslim organisations,
individuals in academia, the association of people
with disability, national and international NGOs and
research organisations etc.
These groups are currently organised under the
Civil Society Council (CIVISOC) as part of the
Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative
(SAPRI). CIVISOC, whose secretariat is hosted by
ISODEC, is involved in outreach activities on economic
literacy and facilitates civil society input into
policy-making mechanisms such as the World Bank's
Country Assistance Strategies (CAS) and the
Consultative Forum on Ghana.
ISODEC also facilitated the formation of the Ghana
National Education Campaign Coalition (GNECC) - a
coalition of 25 civil society organisations promoting
the right to good quality and enjoyable education for
all children in Ghana. Currently ISODEC chairs the
technical sub-committee, which is co-ordinating
extensive research on the state of education in Ghana.
In its reproductive health activities, ISODEC is
part of a group of organisations, working to establish
a network of family reproductive health and
reproductive rights aimed at promoting a holistic
approach to reproductive health, which has,
socio-economic and women's rights at the core.
The question then is why advocate? Four main
reasons drive ISODEC's advocacy work?
1.Given the fact that Ghana did not grow out of the
objective and subjective conditions of her people it
is necessary for the people to constantly keep the
state in check through various mechanisms; including
holding the state accountable, transparent and
responsive under the social contract between the state
and people.
2.There is an invasion and occupation of the
private sphere of society by big business and global
capital under the guise of globalisation and in the
face of weak states in Ghana and Africa in general.
This is achieved through instruments like the IMF,
World Bank and the WTO and their so-called reforms
that seek to remove and or replace the state.
For example for over 20 years, the IMF and World
Bank have been deeply involved in formulating public
policies in Ghana. In 1999, IMF arrangements with the
Government of Ghana (GOG) included 80 conditions with
which the GOG was obligated to comply. Sixty-one of
these 80 conditions were related to the political
governance of the country. The practice of imposing
conditionality infringes on a borrowing government's
sovereignty and shrinks the democratic arena, or
political space, within which citizens can operate.
Donors and creditors can essentially micromanage the
government through loan conditions that may dictate
which laws to pass, which enterprises to privatize, or
what ceiling to impose on social spending.
As it is, foreign actors usually diminish the
political space in Ghana, distort government-civil
society relations, (and, in some respects, cripple)
the autonomy of government and people of Ghana to
shape our nation's future. Hence, ISODEC analyzes
proposals set forth by foreign actors on the basis of
whether the proposals create or diminish the political
space for Ghanaians to shape Ghana's future1 .
2.As part of its empowerment programmes under the
Rights-based Advocacy ISODEC hopes to achieve three
broad Goals:
- Provide data/information and Analysis to CSOs to
help provide capacity for understanding, appreciating
and taking part in economic decision making
- Assist the state to reduce its over-dependence on
external actors and better engage with its development
partners in the interest of Ghana, and
- Build capacity within ourselves and other
elements of state and CSOs aimed at restraining the
undue influence and dominance of international
Financial Institutions and other powerful bi-laterals
in our domestic political and economic decision making
3.Civil Society in general and NGOs in particular
consider issues of politics to be the domain of
politicians and the economy to be the domain of
economists. This attitude is largely responsible for
the exclusion and marginalisation of the people for
historical, capacity constraints and other reasons.
ISODEC aims to help demystify and clarify the arenas
of politics and economics for the empowerment of CSOs
for meaningful participation and the reclaiming of the
state to the people.
Privatisation and our anti-privatisation campaigns
Akolgo explains that since 1983 Ghana has been
locked into a number of IMF and WB led reforms under
various names/titles from Economic recovery Program (ERP)
to Structural Adjustments Program (SAPs) and now
Poverty Reduction Strategies (GPRS). Central to these
reforms is the rolling back of the state and
privatization of state assets in the name of
efficiency. He said these reforms have only succeeded
in landing Ghana in a state of Highly Poor and
Indebted Country status.
He said ISODEC opposes the view that everything to
do with private or business or market is always good
and anything about state or Government is always bad.
"We also believe that the state has a responsibility
to provide basic services to its people and that the
market is not good at providing common goods (health,
education, water, environmental protection)", explains
Akolgo.
In addition to the above ISODEC argues that
privatization of utilities has not delivered in any
Country and will definitely not deliver in sub-Saharan
Africa. No doubt, the adroitness with which ISODEC has
fought its way through the water privatization debate
that has put Ghana on the world map once more and
compelled many academics, and surprisingly the Bank
and IMF to rethink their position on privatization.
The programme has all, but stalled, with the World
Bank now conceding that the results of privatization
are mixed and that privatization sometimes works in
areas such as telecommunications and not water.
In many countries ISODEC has become a household
name, with many students, researchers turning to the
organisation for information and direction on
privatization. In all these ISODEC has taken pains to
explain that it is not anti-government, adding that if
not for anything, it is helping government to defend
the national interest against the marauding interest
of International Financial Institutions and
transnational corporations.
Rudolf Amenga-Etego, Coordinator of National
Coalition Against Privatisation of Water observes that
the "success ISODEC has achieved on the water front
has changed the NGO culture in Ghana and West Africa.
Many NGOs have had to rethink their policies."
Amenga-Etego explains that ISODEC thought it wise to
spend money changing lives rather than trying to
provide everything. And that seems to be working.
In Akolgo's words, " more than anything, we are
helping government to keep the social contract of
providing education, health, water and sanitation." He
said one of the advocacy issues confronting ISODEC is
how to make government provide budgetary allocations
for essential services like water and health.
"From now on we will be making provision of basic
needs political party campaign issues. Politicians
will be asked to state their positions on how to
reduce our dependence on foreign donors, what are the
strategic assets they will not sell to foreigners,
what their vision for the country is and most
importantly how they intend to improve on provision of
essential services," he said.
These are the issues Bishop hopes will form the
basis of the next general elections, especially in the
three northern regions and the Central Region, where
poverty is very pervasive.
Because advocacy has become the central focus of
ISODEC, it has restructured its operations. Its
subsidiaries; Public Agenda a bi- Weekly Newspaper and
Cedis Finance Foundation (CFF) a micro-credit project
and its affiliates; Bawku East Small Scale Farmers
Association Rural Bank (BESSFA), the Centre for Public
Interest Law (CEPIL), Centre for Public-Private
Co-operation (CPPC) in Nigeria and ORCADE in Burkina
Faso will now feed their projects into the Advocacy
and Campaign Unit. It is interesting to note that
ISODEC has extended its operations to Nigeria and
Burkina Faso, where CPPC and ORCADE are providing West
African linkages.
Repositioning for a human rights organisation
In 1992 the organisation held a major review of its
operations during which it became clear that it was
not enough just doing services delivery. ISODEC felt
the need to start asking why the vulnerable, mostly
women and children from deprived regions did not have
the services they needed to sustain life.
The 1992 evaluation of ISODEC's role gave birth to
its advocacy and campaigns policy. In 1999 ISODEC re-strategised
with her constituencies and partners and moved into
becoming a Human Rights organization. A 3-year
Rights-Based Advocacy framework (RBA) and Program of
work (POW) was adopted which consolidated its service
support and advocacy experiences in a single human
rights and divided into three parts'
1. Northern Ghana (Institutional capacity building,
Family reproductive Health, Disaster systems and
Education)
2. Southern Ghana (water and sanitation, Education)
, and
3. Central Programs (Facilitation of change,
Research, Training). This was necessary because for
ISODEC to achieve her mission she had to adopt the
thematic groups and cross-functional self-organising
matrix approach for co-ordinating programs across
individual and geographical areas by a combination of
service support, research/advocacy and
subsidiaries/affiliates.
The Research and Advocacy program consist of 2 main
programs:
1. The Economic Justice Program (Budgets Analysis,
Globalisation Response and Grassroots Economic
Literacy and Learning Programs)
2. Rights Promotion program (Disability Rights,
Economic and Social Rights and Centre for Public
Interest Law).
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