By Eugene Nyarko Jnr. | Accra | July 14, 2026
The National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), in collaboration with UNICEF, has held a validation meeting on the draft Results Framework for the Resetting Ghana Agenda: Creating Jobs, Ensuring Accountability and Promoting Shared Prosperity Policy Framework (2026–2029) to establish a robust system for measuring the country’s development performance over the next four years.
The meeting, held on Monday, July 13, 2026, brought together representatives from Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), development partners, academia and planning professionals to review and validate the indicators, baselines and targets that will guide the implementation and monitoring of the medium-term national development policy.
Opening the meeting, the Director-General of the NDPC, Dr. Audrey Smock Amoah, explained that the development of a results framework is the critical next step after the preparation of a national policy framework, as it provides the basis for assessing progress towards achieving policy objectives.
She said the validation exercise was intended to ensure that stakeholders reviewed and endorsed the indicators and targets that would be used to track Ghana’s development performance, including the core indicators that all Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) would be required to report on during the implementation period.
Dr. Amoah noted that while MMDAs would report on the agreed core indicators, institutions would continue to monitor additional indicators aligned with their specific mandates as outlined in the Medium-Term Development Plans they had already submitted to the Commission for certification.
The Director for Monitoring and Evaluation at the NDPC, Mr. Bright Atiase, described the results framework as both “a roadmap and a scorecard” for measuring the implementation of development policies, programmes and projects across government institutions.
He explained that the Commission was deliberately shifting emphasis from lower-level input and output indicators to outcome and impact indicators, while retaining only those output indicators considered essential for monitoring progress.
Mr. Atiase stressed that indicators included in the framework must be measurable and supported by reliable data, observing that several indicators contained in previous development frameworks were never tracked throughout the implementation period.
He therefore urged institutions to avoid retaining indicators they lacked the capacity to measure and encouraged them to establish realistic targets based on credible baselines and verified data sources.
“Let’s set our targets as close to realistic figures as possible,” he advised.
Representing UNICEF, Dr. Felix Addo-Yobo underscored the importance of using reliable, timely and well-disaggregated data in developing the results framework.
He explained that relying solely on national averages could mask significant disparities within communities, pointing to pockets of poverty in relatively affluent areas such as Accra.
According to him, development planning that fails to incorporate adequately disaggregated data risks overlooking vulnerable populations and undermining efforts to achieve inclusive and equitable development outcomes.
The validation meeting forms part of the NDPC’s ongoing efforts to strengthen Ghana’s planning, monitoring and evaluation systems and ensure that the implementation of the 2026–2029 Medium-Term National Development Policy Framework is guided by measurable, evidence-based results.
