The Chairman of the African Peer Review Mechanism-Governing Council (APRM-GC), Professor S.K. Agyepong, has said the Council has been charged with the responsibility of monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the National Programme of Action following Ghana's successful review process. He said since 2006, the Governing Council had disseminated findings of the report to Ministries, Departments and stakeholders, including people at the grassroots through the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE). He said Ghana's APRM Country Review Report which had received universal acceptance had been simplified to make it accessible to the wider populace. Addressing a National African Peer Review Governing Council (NAPRM-GC) meeting, Dr Agyepong said the Governing Council had prepared a popular version of the report, which was being translated into six major Ghanaian languages, and would soon be made available to the NCCE for distribution throughout the country. The Review Meeting was held together with the Local Government Council (LGS) to evaluate the implementation of the decentralization component of the good governance theme under the APRM process. The meeting forms part of the monitoring and evaluation segment of the implementation of the APRM Programme of Action. The APRM Programme of Action is a set of recommendations proposed by Ghanaians for implementation by government during the country review process. This is to ensure that the Programme of Action is implemented and mapped into the Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS II) and other development documents. Dr. Agyepong said the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning had for instance charged all MDAs to ensure that APRM activities henceforth reflected in the annual budgets and reports of Ministries, Departments and Agencies. Prof. Agyepong said the Council had developed the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework to monitor the progress of implementation by all stakeholders. The framework, he said, had been aligned to existing monitoring and evaluation systems for sustainability and avoidance of duplication in the collection and processing of data. The LGS on their part asked for concrete moves towards the implementation of its programme of action. They provided the APRM with a list of challenges in the way of the country's efforts at real decentralization and asked the APRM to include those challenges in their progress reports and the next round of Programme of Action for redress. Credit: GNA