USAID inaugurates support project and centre of excellence


By Edmund Smith-Asante, ACCRA
 
The US Ambassador, Mr Gene Cretz being assisted to open the ACE facility. They are from the left, the ASSESS Chief of Party, Abdourahmane Ba, USAID Mission Director Alex Deprez and the KNUST Vice Chancellor Mr W Otoo Ellis
A five year US$24 million project to promote creativity, innovation and learning developed by the United States Agency for International Aid (USAID), and its development partners was launched in Accra on Friday.

The launch included the opening of a new Accra Centre of Excellence (ACE) facility, which is a training and conference centre that will stimulate networking, knowledge sharing and partnership building, to further strengthen development programmes and improve their outcomes across West Africa.
Known as the Analytical Support Services and Evaluations for Sustainable Systems (ASSESS) project, it is expected to use independent evaluations, analysis and the sharing of best practices to increase the effectiveness of programmes undertaken by USAID and partners.

The partners include the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service, the University of Rhode Island, Delaware State University, and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. 

Explaining how the project will be carried out, the United States Ambassador to Ghana, Mr Gene A. Cretz, said “Through ASSESS, technical experts will provide evaluations and assessments to bolster our development efforts in agriculture, environment, trade and energy.

“Lessons learned from these endeavours can be shared across the region with public and private sector actors to improve and increase crop yields and production, thus effectively ‘scaling-up’ our developmental impact.” 

The ASSESS Project has four components, which are evaluations; to improve programmatic interventions and learning agenda; to promote experimentation, innovation and measured risk-taking.
The rest are capacity building of local and regional evaluation organisations and management of the Accra Centre of Excellence (ACE).

Writer’s email: Edmund.Asante@graphic.com.gh   

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