District League Table Policy Brief

This brief outlines policy considerations and recommendations to enhance public service delivery and promote equitable development across all districts in Ghana. It advocates for data-driven, decision making, targeted resource allocation, and strategic interventions tailored to districts’ unique needs and challenges. Furthermore, the brief encourages the deepening of inclusive and participatory approaches to planning, implementing, and monitoring development interventions to ensure all stakeholders contribute to and benefit from the country’s development agenda.

The District League Table (DLT) provides a snapshot of the state of public service delivery in Metropolises, Municipalities and Districts (MMDs)1 based on selected indicators. The DLT synthesises data on education, health, nutrition, sanitation, water, child protection, energy, and governance to compute a composite score for each MMD. The scores, among others, highlight the level of basic service delivery, and the extent of inequalities and disparities across the country.

This brief analyses the results of the DLT Reports for 2021 and 2022 to identify trends, achievements, and areas requiring urgent attention. The analysis is organised around key sectors of MMDs as contained in the 2021 and 2022 DLT reports. 

The Evolution of Social Policy: Up to and Beyond COVID-19

‘Jimi O. Adesina 

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated to the global community the need for social policies that are more broadly conceived. There is also an imperative, both in the current period of global crisis and in the long-term, for development researchers, policymakers and practitioners to envision, advocate for, and design social policy infrastructures that are more robust. This briefing paper reflects on the history of social policymaking in Africa to help us to think about how we can create a relevant, comprehensive and impactful social policy regimes for African countries, during and beyond these dynamic times. 

Social Policy in Times of Crises 

Michael Kpessa-Whyte 

The COVID-19 pandemic, while originally a health crisis, has become a crisis of education, housing, employment and labour market, food security, social security, care and so on. These crises have exposed the vulnerability of our societies, compelling us to rethink how economic and social activities are organized to promote human well-being, which is the ultimate concern of social policy (see Box 1). In our attempts to address the COVID-19 pandemic, what lessons can African countries draw from a history of crises across different times and places? 

Gender Equitable and Transformative Social Policy Beyond COVID-19 

Dzodzi Tsikata 

COVID-19 has shown that, while global crises affect all who live on the planet, its impacts at country-levels are highly differentiated and often worsen existing gender, class and spatial inequalities. State responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have exposed the limitations of our current social policy systems to address these inequalities. What opportunities does the current crisis offer us to develop transformative social policy that will lead to more equitable societies?