The LRC, led by our Executive Director, Daphne Lariba Nabila, and Enock Jengre, Programmes Officer, participate in the 2025 Open Government Partnership (OGP) Africa & Middle East Regional Meeting in Nairobi, Kenya.
The convening, which commenced yesterday, seeks to inter alia, discuss how to enhance government & civil society partnership, collaboration and engagement on topical issues, including access to justice, open parliament, citizen participation, etc, under the OGP initiative.
OGP is a multilateral initiative that aims to secure commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance through collaboration with civil society.
Ghana has since 2011 joined the OGP and has submitted various National Action Plans (NAPs) on various thematic areas relative to the object of OGP. However, until recently, there was no commitment in Ghana’s NAP in the area of justice, even though the country is plague with challenges on access to justice and legal aid.
To overcome this, last year, the LRC successfully mobilised justice sector civil society organizations across Ghana where it effectively collaborated with the Ghana OGP Secretariat, the Ministry of the Interior and the Legal Aid Commission and the Grassroot Justice Network to have a standalone commitment on justice unto Ghana’s 5th OGP NAP through amendment.
Led by the LRC from the civil society side, together with the key government institutions and Ghana’s OGP Secretariat, Ghana now has a standalone commitment on justice in the areas of;
- Passage into law of the Community Service Bill
- Passage into law of the Legislative Instrument and Legal Aid Commission (implementation of Paralegal System) Regulations.
As these two frameworks are yet to be passed into law, the LRC continues to engage the relevant institutions in its advocacy interventions to have these frameworks passed into law to realise the required dividends.
