Governance and peace poll in Ghana

Pulse Lab Kampala created a powerful and interactive visualisation tool for the UNDP Ghana and its implementing partners. This visualisation provides easy insight into data collected in The Governance and Peace (GaP) Poll survey project. The GaP poll is a nationally representative public opinion tracking survey that seeks to support the management of results relating to issues of governance and peace. The visualisations by Pulse Lab Kampala help end-users to interact and better understand the results of the poll and compare with previously held polls, aiding decision-making based on the survey results.

Explore GaP Survey Results

The visualisation below shows opinion trends based on three surveys held in June 2014 (GaP I), November 2014 (GaP II) and March 2015 (GaP III).

Have a look by taking these steps:

1
 Choose a survey.

2
 Choose a question from the survey.

3
 Choose a response.

4
 Choose a region within the country.

5
 Analyse results compared to surveys over time, compared to the rest of the country and across a gender breakdown.

1
Choose GaP Poll:  GaP Poll I    GaP Poll II    GaP Poll III  
2
Choose Question:
3
Choose Response:
 
4
Click a region to display its results on the left
  Responses in the three GaP Polls for Region
5
  Regional response comapared to national response
  Gender Breakdown

Key Findings

Overall approval of Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assembly performance

Respondents rated the performance of their metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies on maintaining roads, markets, cleanliness, health standards and public lands. Results show that Brong Ahafo is perceived to give the best performance and the Greater Accra to provide the worst performance.


Respondents answering positively to the performance on metropolitan, municipal and districts assemblies.

Lack of public meetings

Respondents commonly answered that there were no meetings held by their representatives. For example, across the nation, on average 60% said their Member of Parliament never held public meetings.


Respondents reporting that their MP never organises meetings with citizens.

Gender Analysis

High gender disparities

On average most questions in the survey were answered similarly by both men and women. However, there were some areas where answers were very different. Men were more likely to report having communicated with their representatives and to attend meetings. They also reported to have more contact with service providers.

Women more often weren’t aware about frequency of meetings and knowledge of institutions.

Communicated views/problems to Assembly representative at least once:

22% of women 42% of men

Attended all meetings held by Assembly representative:

14% of women 25% of men

No knowledge of the legal aid scheme:

76% of women 66% of men

Don't know how often their Member of Parliament organises meetings:

32% of women 23% of men

Correlations

Here the relationship between answers are explored. Questions are visualised as dots and the lines connecting them indicates a strong or weak relation with another question (visualised a thick or thin line). Go ahead, play around with them to better understand how the questions in the survey correlate. Double click on a question node to see correlations with it.

There is a strong relation between question 7C and question 7D. This suggests that women who are willing to accept a role in a private sector organisation are also willing to accept a role in a public sector organisation.

There is also a strong relation between question 5B and 5C. This illustrates that people who attend meetings organised by assembly representatives are more like to attend meetings organised by unit committee members.

Question 10 is not correlated with any other questions hence no connections.

Click for Key findings from correlation analysis

Different competencies for Municipal, Metropolitan or District Assemblies Performance

The responses to question 1 show that there are links between the perceived performance of Municipal, Metropolitan or District Assemblies in some, but not all, different capacities. For example, performance at maintaining roads was moderately correlated with performance at maintaining markets. However, neither of these was associated with performance on maintaining land use. This suggests that different MMDAs have different strengths and weaknesses (as opposed, for example, to MMDAs having different overall effectiveness, and scoring either well or poorly on all categories).


Significant associations between different aspects of MMDA performance.

Payment of bribes is most associated with the police

As question 9 illustrates, people who reported having had contact with the police in the last 12 months were significantly more likely to have paid a bribe than those having contact with other service providers.


Correlation between contact with different service providers and response to Q9: "Did you have to pay a bribe?"

Note that this relation does not necessarily correspond directly to the frequency of bribes asked by each type of service provider, as people did not state who they paid the bribe to. For example, those who said they were in contact with the media were also likely to report having been in contact with the police, which may indirectly increase the correlation score between questions 8I (contact with media) and question 9 (payment of bribe). What we can conclude from these scores, is that the police are in a different category from other service providers in terms of bribe payments.

Individuals attending any type of governance meeting were likely to attend all other types as well

People who attended meetings organised by either Members of Parliament or Unit Committee members were likely to perceive those meetings as being held frequently. That is what the strong relation between question 5B and 5C suggests. Furthermore, someone who attended any type of meeting was likely to attend all the other types of meetings as well; that is, individuals could be characterised as having different overall levels of engagement in governance processes.

Meeting participation is not related to women's willingness to adopt leadership positions

Two measures of participation in governance were recorded in the GaP polls: attendance at meetings organised by representatives, and frequency of communication of views and problems to those representatives. Women's activity in either of these respects was not a predictor of their willingness to adopt a role in any management position, political or otherwise.

Partners

The GaP Poll is a multi-stakeholder project involving UNDP Ghana and its implementing partners:

The Inter-Ministerial Coordinating Committee on Decentralization (IMCC)
The Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ)
The National Peace Council (NPC)
The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS)
The Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana)

Data Privacy and Protection

The privacy issues are addressed through the privacy and data protection principles set out by UN Global Pulse. These principles are designed to ensure that the data analysed is handled with the utmost protection of the interests of the individuals involved.

About Pulse Lab Kampala

Pulse Lab Kampala is the third lab of the United Nations Global Pulse network. It supports the UN Country Team and the Government of Uganda to achieve the Global Goals for sustainable development. As a regional hub, it leverages data innovation, new sources of digital 'Big Data' and real-time analysis techniques.

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Photo credits: College Life by Adam Cohn, Oware by Adam Cohn and Ghana -USA 2-1 by Stig Nygaard Heuler/VOA.