The voice of Denmark is strong in Ghana

By Lars Zbinden Hansen

The connection between Denmark and Ghana is not of recent date. It started more than 350 years ago when Danes settled on “the Gold Coast” and over time established five forts. From here they bought and transported slaves to the West Indies. The forts are still in existence, and serve to remind us of a murky chapter in the book of shared history.

But in the midst of this historical darkness, a royal envoy shines. Paul Erdmann Isert wrote in his letters from 1788 that he was ‘sickened by the horror and misery’ he saw in the treatment of the slaves.
And after the Danes finally left the coast, Isert returned with royal Danish support to establish a colony that was to be based on collaboration, not slavery.

The idea was to grow sugar cane, coffee and cocoa for export. The locals were to receive wages for their work, and if Isert had succeeded with the project, a ‘win-win-situation’ would have resulted for everybody. But he didn't succeed. As with so many other white men on the Gold Coast, Isert died from tropical disease.

With his humanistic, practical and optimistic approach however, Isert managed to make such an impression that his name has stayed in Ghanaian history, and in the capital of Accra a street is named after him.



Mutual respect
There is thus a certain historical logic to the Danish embassy today being located precisely on Dr. Isert Road, and that the essence of the Danish assistance cooperation with Ghana is a humanistic and pragmatic approach, focused on collaboration and mutual respect.
In the yellow-painted single storey building which houses the embassy, Ambassador Stig Barlyng says in his quality Danish furniture bedecked office that “it is important that we discuss principles together and respect each other. And we do that much more than previously when we just came and decided. It is essential to progress that a country gets used to managing its own policies and development. Denmark's greatest task here is to help the Ghanaians to manage their systems”.

Although the Ghanaian administration lacks money and sufficiently trained staff in all departments, the Ghanaians have managed to develop their own strategy for poverty reduction. And this forms the basis for support from Denmark and other donors. There is a close collaboration between Ghana and the donors which is eased by the democracy taking root in Ghana. With the election in 1992, almost 30 years of political turbulence and unrest was replaced by democratic development which has stayed ever since.
“After four successive, free and fair democratic elections, the Ghanaians are very conscious of the importance of democracy, and at government level there is a clear wish to improve the population's conditions”, says Ambassador Barlyng.
The key concept for Danish development policy is combating poverty, and good governance is considered essential in order for cooperation countries to pull themselves out of poverty. The concept has also been the focal point of the Danish-Ghanaian cooperation which began in 1989.

Growth but still problems
Ghana has seen steady economic growth since 1992 – in 2008 it was 7.2 per cent – and the country has already reached the 2015 target of halving extreme poverty, but there are still massive problems. More than a third of the population lives below the poverty line of 2 US dollars per day, hunger is rife especially in the northern regions, less than half of the population has access to clean water, child mortality is high, and the health and educational systems are in many ways run-down and dilapidated.

The inflation rate is around 14 per cent and the country's currency, the Cedi, has lost almost a third of its value against the US dollar over the last year. And as yet no decision has been taken on how a major oil find in 2007 off the coast of Ghana should be exploited so that it benefits the population.

So the country is still dependent on development assistance, which accounts for around 40 per cent of the budget. Denmark is among the 8 largest donors in Ghana, and in 2008 allocated DKK 441 million (EUR 59 million) across a range of areas including healthcare, water and sanitation, business, good governance and human rights, budget support and transport. But the trend is to limit assistance to fewer areas.

This is a continuation of the Paris Declaration from March 2005, when more than 100 countries crystallised a pressing need for coordinating and making the assistance collaboration more efficient to avoid overlaps and duplication. The code words in Paris were ‘harmonisation’ and ‘alignment’, which didn't just mean coordination between donors, but also that the assistance should be aligned with the recipient countries' systems and plans.

Denmark is working actively in Ghana to establish division of effort between the 16 large assistance donors engaged in the country. Denmark's aim is to concentrate Danish assistance on areas where it has long experience. For example, DKK 170 million (EUR 23 million) has been allocated over the next five years to a programme for good governance and human rights. In these areas, Denmark has been a significant player for years in Ghana.

Show me your programme
As in other developing countries, the World Bank is the largest donor in Ghana. Country Director Ishac Diwan, who is Lebanese, says in his office in the neighbouring building to the Danish embassy on Dr. Isert Road, that Danish influence in the assistance work in Ghana is significant.

“The voice of Denmark is strong. The Danish try to push the whole donor community in their particular fields of interest, and they are good at it. They tend to be very direct and say to the Ghanaians: ‘Show me your programme, show me your indicators, and we’ll work something out on that basis’. But they still do it with respect for the Ghanaians whom they treat as equal partners.”

But although the focus of most assistance players is directed towards the Paris Declaration's principles of harmonisation, alignment, local ownership of assistance, managing for results and mutual accountability, there is still a long way to go before donors and recipient countries work from a common agenda.

There is still a strong tendency for donors to concentrate primarily on their country's compliance with its own strategies, rules and regulations. The donors are different, have varying perceptions of how assistance should be provided, and often their internal procedures are so diverse, that they are not easy to synchronise.

The World Bank, for example, is not subject to the same direct political and public control as the Danish assistance, which is regularly and sometimes fiercely debated in Denmark. The World Bank obtains its funds in the capitals of the donor countries, but although there is tight internal control and automatic monitoring by the donor countries and the press, the culture and procedures are different in the World Bank than in the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which implements the Danish assistance.

Perhaps it is this different starting point and the different approach that makes Director Diwan, with a twinkle in his eye, call the Danish staff in Ghana ‘realistic dreamers of very high quality. They try to transform their good intentions and strategies into tangible results – but based in the real world and within the idea of partnership’. So the Danish voice is listened to in the donor cooperation, which Diwan describes as ‘well-established and well planned’.

Donor strategies must be synchronised
The coordination between the donors' heads of assistance takes place in monthly meetings. This is where the Ghanaian strategies and programmes are discussed, to ensure that the donors do not prepare parallel programmes, but adopt a common approach.

And it is during these meetings that Denmark, in Ambassador's Barlyng's words, tries ‘to push the agenda’ by maintaining the focus on the intentions of the Paris Declaration. The Joint Assistance Strategy for Ghana, G-JAS, which the donors adopted in February 2007, is currently top of the agenda.

The JAS, which the assistance players aim to prepare for all cooperation countries, is the object of strong Danish interest in Ghana and is currently being revised – on Denmark's initiative. The strategies are part of the efforts to meet the Paris Declaration's intentions on ‘harmonisation’ and ‘alignment’. The purpose is to synchronise the various donors' strategies with the recipient country's own strategies and development plans.

Ambassador Barlyng is a great advocate for the new coordinated approach, which in his words ‘brings the development cooperation up to a holistic, higher strategic level’.

“Previously each donor operated with a complete range of isolated projects that involved a number of individual ministries in the cooperation countries. In that way we were helping to distort the countries' development work,” he says.

The distortion resulted from a lack of internal coherence between the various donors' assistance work. The recipient countries were simply not required to relate to an overall strategy for reducing poverty, and instead proceeded in a haphazard fashion.

Today the recipient countries have voluntarily agreed to think holistically. A key point in the Paris Declaration is that recipient countries must take over the ownership of the assistance, in a coordinating process with the donors.

“In Ghana we have slowly started to channel the assistance through the country's Ministry of Finance, to help to get the overall system to function. It is very important that a country's finance ministry itself keeps charge of the money,” says Stig Barlyng.

Assistance channelled through Ministry of Finance
A change has thus occurred in the assistance from earmarking of individual projects towards budget support, which requires capacity in the Ghanaian Ministry of Finance. And there is still a lack of capacity, acknowledges both Ambassador Barlyng and the Deputy Head of Mission Jan Pirouz Poulsen, who in practice leads the Danish assistance work on a day-to-day basis.

“Ghana has a capacity problem, not only in the ministries, but practically everywhere. However, good intentions are clearly present in the Ghanaian administration”, says Jan Pirouz Poulsen, who also confirms the description of the Danish approach by other sources as quite proactive: “We say to the Ghanaians: show us your strategies and your wishes, and we will see what we can do to help”.
Internally in the Ghanaian state apparatus there is still some reluctance over the assistance now being exclusively channelled through the Ministry of Finance. Previously when donors operated with isolated projects, the assistance was channelled directly to the specific ministries and government institutions which implemented the projects. The individual ministries were also in charge of the technical and political negotiations with the donors. Now the Ministry of Finance is gaining an important controlling and coordinating role, as in Denmark. This involves a new distribution of power with loss of competence and portfolio in the individual ministries, which many civil servants find difficult to accept.

The tendency of money not ending up where it should is a constant threat to assistance in Africa, whether it is for individual projects via specific ministries, or as now channelled though one link, the Ministry of Finance.

The temptation for badly paid civil servants in African ministries to take bribes is strong, but according to several sources corruption is not a very big problem in Ghana. Ambassador Barlyng confirms this.
“Fighting corruption takes place at all levels in Ghanaian society, and in an African context it works quite efficiently. The problem is the capacity in the Ministry of Finance. And that is where we are helping the Ghanaians: with capacity building both in the ministry and in the country's National Audit,” says Ambassador Barlyng, who has not himself seen examples of corruption in the Ghanaian Ministry of Finance.



Access to world markets
Ghanaians do not need any help however with the process of debate in Ghana. It is free and lively and has its visible and audible expression in a sea of newspapers and radio stations, from which there is daily stream of incisive comment and opinion – including from those parts of society who do not agree that Ghana should receive assistance from abroad.

A frequent commentator, Daniel Ogbarmey Tetteh, executive director of the finance institute Databank Group, has several times stressed that it is ‘trade, not aid’, Ghana needs.
He thinks it is better for Ghana – and Africa – to gain access to world markets, and that real, direct investments start coming into the continent.
“To develop our country we must start with farming. We need processing and storage facilities and infrastructure to transport products. And crucially, we need open markets for our products,” says Daniel Tetteh, who acknowledges that there is still some way to go before that scenario becomes reality. In the meantime it is important that there are external partners to keep the government on the right track.
“Aid in its current form is useful right now but is not sustainable in the long run,” says Daniel Tetteh, who considers Ghanaian society ‘a lot more dynamic now than before, especially with democracy taking root.’
“I am generally optimistic about the future,” he says.
Daniel Tetteh is not the only one feeling optimistic on Ghana's behalf. There are still many difficult problems, but practically everywhere in the country a new optimism can be detected, which is not found in neighbouring countries.

This optimism was strengthened after the smooth change of government in January this year, and was further supported by the very popular President Barack Obama visiting Accra in July on his first and so far only visit to Africa as US president.

Obama helped consolidate this optimism through a keynote speech in parliament, not far from the old Danish fort Christiansborg, where the Danish diplomatic representative Paul Isert toiled away at his work just over 200 years ago.

Lars Zbinden Hansen is a freelance journalist living in Lomé in Togo. He regularly reports from Togo and its neighbouring countries, such as Ghana.

This article is from Focus Denmark Magazine, Zooming In (October 2009)