The Strategic Youth Network for Development (SYND) held a CSOs engagement workshop with a representative from African Development Bank in February this year.

The goal of the meeting was to create awareness on the ACCESS members on the multilateral development banks’ engagements with Civil Society Organizations. The members were empowered on how they can actively engage and influence the bank policies and programmes.

Ezekiel Chibeze, SYND’s Director noted that the AfDB’s Country Strategy Paper (CSP) for Ghana would lapse later in the year and there are opportunities for CSOs in West Africa to engage and contribute in the development of the next CSP (2024-2028).

Bekale Ollame, AfDB’s Principal Country Program Officer, shared on Ghana’s Country Strategic Paper (2019 – 2023). It has two strategic pillars of supporting Ghana’s industrialization and private sector development, and supporting infrastructure projects that are enablers of domestic, regional and global trade with climate change as a cross cutting theme that is mainstreamed into its policies.

AfDB engages CSOs at the corporate, country and project levels. At the corporate level, the engagement occurs through forums and committees. At the country level, it is through country dialogues and the CSP. While at the project level, they engage at project design, and to monitor the impacts of the project.

In addition, SYND developed information materials on AfDB and World Bank’s policy documents and disseminated them to the members.

SYND is the ACCESS Coalition’s Regional Node for West Africa, and the lead in implementing ACCESS’ goals of SDG 7 implementation, influencing AfDB investments and CSOs participation and sharing knowledge and capacity building on the members.