Parliament has approved GH¢111.9 million to defray part of GH¢321.3 million being arrears owed to service providers under the sanitation module of the Youth Employment Agency (YEA), which was left by the previous National Democratic Congress (NDC) administration.
Parliament has also approved GH¢70.1 million for the School Feeding and the School Uniform Programmes which were ignored in 2016.
The approved amounts form part of the proposed formula for the sharing of the District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) for the year 2017 which was tabled before parliament on June 27, 2017 for approval.
Parliament however, said that it would not appropriate any money from the DACF for the School Feeding and the School Uniform Programmes from 2018 and asked the Ministry of Education to take full responsibility for the funding of these two programmes from its budget in subsequent years.
Under the new formula, three institutions – the Youth Employment Agency (YEA), National Youth Authority (NYA) and the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) – were allocated GH¢157,530,534, GH¢78,796,767 and GH¢21,212,090 respectively to fund the implementation of their various programmes.
In all, GH¢1,575,835,339 was approved as the District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) for 2017 by parliament, which falls 28% short of the 2016 allocation of GH¢2,013,913,015.
This is mainly due to the capping of Earmarked Funds at 25% of tax revenue as contained in the 2017 budget statement and economic policy of the government.
However, the amount allocated directly to the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) for their various developmental programmes saw significant increase as against those of 2016.
MMDAs were given GH¢733,188,157 as against GH¢708,406,758 provided in 2016 while indirectly, the MMDAs were given GH¢121,347,021 as against GH¢190,087,130 last year.
Out of the total DACF amount, GH¢47,278,060 has been allocated to take care of people living with disabilities in the country and for the first time, GH¢1,575,935 has been provided to care of lepers in the country;
GH¢32,306,674 was allocated as seed money for construction of office building for new MMDAs while GH¢110,315,474 was given for waste management in the various districts.
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