The Director-General of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Dr Audrey Smock Amoah, has urged stakeholders to strengthen the use of evaluation evidence in national development planning to improve policy implementation, resource allocation and accountability. 

Speaking at the 2026 Ghana Evaluation Week (GEW) Conference at the University of Ghana, Legon, under the theme, “Strengthening Evidence Use for Inclusive Development: Bridging Policy, Practice and Innovation,” she said evaluation must go beyond collecting data and producing reports to informing decisions that deliver better development outcomes.

“Evaluation must help us identify what works, understand implementation gaps and determine what needs to change to deliver better outcomes for all,” Dr Amoah said. She noted that the evaluation of the 2022–2025  Medium-Term National Development Policy Framework informed four strategic shifts for the 2026–2029 framework: strengthening institutional and human capital, advancing regulatory and legal reforms, ensuring predictable financing, and promoting data-driven coordination.

Dr Amoah outlined NDPC’s efforts to strengthen evidence generation and use, including completed mirror reports on the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme, the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Free Senior High School and the Ghana Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS), with support from GIZ through its Participation, Accountability and Integrity for a Resilient Democracy (PAIReD) programme.

“Let us sustain the collaboration and move beyond generating evidence to using it; beyond documenting progress to addressing implementation gaps; and beyond making commitments to achieving measurable improvements in the lives of our people,” she urged, encouraging development partners, academia, civil society and the evaluation community to collaborate in translating evidence into tangible development outcomes.

Ms Dede Bedu-Addo, President/Coordinator of the Ghana Monitoring and Evaluation Forum (GMEF), emphasised the importance of building the organisation’s capacity to sustain its activities and determine its own priorities. She also noted the interest expressed by individuals outside Ghana, highlighting opportunities to broaden the organisation’s reach and strengthen collaboration.

The 2026 Ghana Evaluation Week, being held from 19 to 21 October at the ISSER Conference Room (Auditorium), University of Ghana, Legon, brings together government officials, development partners, researchers and evaluation practitioners to explore ways of strengthening evidence use in development planning and implementation.

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NDPC PR-UNIT