Government says lack of funds has held back the implementation of the Right to Information (RTI) law.

The RTI bill was first presented to Parliament in 1999. After several years, it was finally passed and signed into law in 2019 but the operationalisation of the law was to kick in 2020.

This, therefore, made the Executives of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) visit the Information Ministry to track the progress of the law on Friday.

Addressing them, Technical Officer in charge of the team to implement the law, Selassie Spencer said after the RTI bill was passed a roadmap was adopted to see to the effectiveness of the law.

But, raising capital for the full operationalisation of the law has been a major challenge.

“The reality was, we had a plan but lack of funding more or less affected a great part of this implementation process. So as a Ministry we revised the plan and segregated the activities of the plan to two categories.

“One was to take on activities that do not require so much funding and then defer the other part of the implementation processes that required heavy funding into this year when some money could be made available,” he informed the executives.

Touching on works the Information Ministry has done so far, Mr Spencer said MMDAs have been engaged to map out processes citizens can easily access information.

He indicated that since the law is new in the system, education is needed to harmonise the ways to get information from various organisation.

“After engaging with the MMDAs we were able to come up with the transitions guidelines. We reduced several aspects of the Act into simple guidelines for the institutions to begin to work with when the law is in full force.

“This is because we do not want a situation where a citizen walks into an institution and the person is turned away because the organisation does not know the processes of giving out the information.”