Ghana has rolled out ambitious development blueprints for decades, each promising transformation, each carrying the weight of national hope. However, a critical lingering and difficult question is whether these blueprints, programs, and projects have truly worked.
Amid the mixed outcomes, the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the International Centre for Evaluation and Development (ICED), Dr. David Sarfo Ameyaw, has raised fresh concerns about the country’s long-standing approach to policymaking.
For him, it appears that too many national interventions have been driven by desire and vision rather than verifiable evidence and research.
Policies Without Proof
Dr. Sarfo Ameyaw recounts that from Ghana Vision 2020 to Agenda 2063 and the global Sustainable Development Goals, Ghana has not lacked developmental frameworks or ambition.
However, what remains unclear is how many of these policies have been rigorously evaluated to assess their impact and effectiveness.
Dr. Ameyaw argues that successive governments have introduced reforms without systematically assessing their outcomes, lessons, or long-term impact. The result is a cycle of policy reinvention, often without institutional memory.
“Every reform has been done in Ghana for our 69 years. Different governments, different national planning commissions, we had Vision 2020, we have Vision 2030, we have Agenda 2063. Very soon, in four years, the SDG goals will be coming to an end,” he narrated.
He continued, “The question is, which one of these things has worked? What was the evidence that was used to support these things? What were the challenges? We need to learn, we need to sit down. Were these interventions supported by research, by evidence? And if they are not working, what lessons have we learned? And how do we improve it in the next phase?”
Africa & Ghana’s Limited Voice in Global Evidence & Research
This concern raised by Dr. Sarfo Ameyaw goes beyond Ghana. He observes that across Africa, research output remains limited, contributing less than 7% to global knowledge production.
This, according to the CEO of ICED, weakens the continent’s ability to shape policies rooted in local realities.
Despite this limitation, he insists that valuable research exists, but is often underutilised. He maintains that the issue, therefore, is not just about producing evidence, but about embedding it into decision-making across government, business, and civil society.
“When you look at our contribution as Africa to the global evidence or the research ecosystem, we are not even contributing more than 7%. But whether we are contributing 7% or 5%, we have been able to generate some research here that can inform our government’s action, our NGOs’ practices, our communities’ interventions. And these are some of the things that we want to discuss,” he indicated.
Disconnect Between Policy and Practice
A recurring challenge, Dr. Sarfo Ameyaw, is the disconnect between policy design and implementation. He recounts that key decisions, ranging from food pricing to import duties, are often made without clear visibility on the data or research informing them.
This creates uncertainty for businesses and undermines public confidence in policy outcomes. He is therefore calling for a shift toward evidence-driven governance, where decisions are backed by data, tested through experience, and refined through continuous learning.
For him, as the 2030 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals approaches, the urgency to reassess past interventions is growing.
Without a deliberate effort to document successes and failures, Ghana risks repeating the same policy mistakes under new frameworks, and hence failure to bring about the needed socio-economic transformation.
He insists the path forward is not about crafting new visions, but about understanding what has already been done, and why outcomes have fallen short.
The Evidence to Action Conference
It is against this backdrop that ICED, in collaboration with stakeholders, is organizing the Evidence to Action Conference. The conference seeks to bring together policy makers in government, academia, and industry, the private sector, and others to engage in deeper conversations around evidence and accountability.
The discussions will centre on how research can better inform real-world decisions.
Beyond the event itself, as experts agree, Ghana’s next phase of development may depend less on new ideas and more on how well it learns from the old ones.
