On Tuesday 24th September, 2019 Southern Voice Ghana held a dissemination workshop at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research, ISSER University of Ghana to share and take input on its findings on the study titled: Ensuring access to affordable, sustainable and a clean household energy for all in Ghana – Goal 7 .1 of the SDGs. Similar events on aspects of the SDG Goals were held in focal countries of the Southern Voice spread across five continents.
Welcoming participants to the workshop, chair of the Ghana event Dr. Ama Pokuaa Fenny, Research Fellow at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research, ISSER University of Ghana, gave an overview of the agenda and the motivation for the Southern Voice initiative. She also unveiled the vision and objectives of the study.
Dr. Aba Obrumah Crentsil Research Fellow at ISSER and Lead Investigator of the study, made a presentation on the methodology and results of the study. She also touched on which group is left behind in SDG 7, synergies and trade-offs of the implementation of SDG7 and other SDGs. The Lead Investigator considered dealings on Global systemic issues in delivering SDGs at the national level.
In an interactive session, participants posed a number of questions which Dr. Aba Crentsil responded. A participant from the Institute of Environment and Sanitation Studies asked the research team about the challenges and inspiration for combining three different methodologies for the analysis. The response was that the choice of methodology was motivated by the type of data available, the need to disaggregate the results to identify which group of people are left behind in SDG7, the credibility of the approach in yielding the desired results scientifically, and the need to triangulate the findings.
With regards to challenges, the lead investigator mentioned that combining the three methods required technical expertise. Hence the need for broader expert consultation and content review of technical research papers and reports for secondary data to feed into the Causal Loop and the LEAP-IBC software for the analysis of Business as Usual Scenarios and Policy Success Scenarios.
Other participants also gave useful inputs through their contributions in an effort to enrich the results of the findings. Winding up proceedings of the event, Dr. Ama Fenny noted five outstanding issues for participants to contemplate and provide feedback to improve the results of the findings. The issues include how to change household motivation and choices to use clean fuels, how limited coordination impacts on clean energy service delivery and deficiency in our energy policies and their implementation. Other issues are how access to disaggregated data for this kind of analysis can be improved and whether our energy policy is pro-poor enough.
The event attracted participants from the Energy Commission, Ministry of Planning, and the Regional Institute of Population Studies. Others were the Ministry of Environment, Science and Technology, Institute of Environment and Sanitation Studies of the University of Ghana, PhD and Masters students of the University of Ghana.
