The National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) and the International Centre for Evaluation and Development (ICED) on Monday, 13th July 2026 held a meeting to deepen their collaboration on the development of a Ghana National Evidence and Gap Map, a digital platform intended to consolidate research and evaluation evidence to support the country's development planning.

Opening the discussion, Miss Clarice Panyin Nyan a representative of ICED explained that the meeting had been convened to strengthen the ongoing collaboration between the two institutions and to agree on next steps. She noted that while NDPC was leading the initiative with support from ICED's research team, other institutions, including the Ghana Statistical Service and the Parliamentary Research Department, were also coming on board to help co-develop the evidence and support programme.

The President and CEO of ICED, Dr. David Sarfo Ameyaw explained that, at NDPC's request, ICED's team had worked with NDPC staff over a two-day meeting to catalogue the development interventions contained in the national development plan, spanning areas such as social protection and poverty reduction, agriculture and food security, youth employment, education, health service delivery, infrastructure and public works, governance and transparency, and the environment. 

"Now that we have got this framework, the question is, which areas do we have evidence [for]?" Dr. Ameyaw said, explaining that the goal was to bring together evaluations, end-of-project reports and academic research currently scattered across institutional libraries and websites into a single, regularly updated map. He said this would allow NDPC, government officials or members of Parliament to access synthesised evidence "at the click of a button," with artificial intelligence tools helping to process and present the information.

Responding, the Director-General of NDPC, Dr. Audrey Smock Amoah proposed that the interventions already mapped be reorganised around the five thematic dimensions used in Ghana's national development policy framework: economic development; social development; environment, infrastructure and spatial development; governance and institutional development; and international relations. 

She noted that NDPC is also developing a consolidated national development plan for the long-term, structured around the same five dimensions, thus aligning the evidence and gap map to this structure would ease its integration into that longer-term framework later. 
She said issues relating to monitoring and evaluation would fall under the governance dimension, and that NDPC already coordinates the reporting and implementation of Ghana's Sustainable Development Goals, including three completed Voluntary National Reviews and a number of Voluntary Local Reviews carried out by districts, which could feed into the exercise.

Dr. Amoah welcomed the partnership, saying NDPC had been engaging with academic institutions, including the University for Development Studies, on similar efforts to ground policy decisions in evidence rather than instinct, and expressed hope that such collaboration would in time make evidence-based decision-making the norm across government.

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NDPC PR-UNIT