The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a multilateral initiative aimed at promoting transparency, accountability, citizen empowerment, and anti-corruption efforts. Open governance strengthens democracy by ensuring citizens have a say in decisions that affect their lives, as well as access to information and mechanisms for accountability. Ghana joined the OGP in September 2011, aligning its goals with the principles enshrined in its 1992 Constitution. Since then, successive governments have implemented reforms to enhance governance through transparency, civic engagement, and the use of technology. With support from civil society, the Government of Ghana has co-created and implemented four National Action Plans (NAPs) through a collaborative process to promote open and accountable governance.
There is a widely held perception that OGP processes are mainly dominated by national-level NGOs, leaving the local and community-based organizations behind. At the 2024 OGP global summit in Estonia, the Grassroots Justice Network together with its partners organized a side event on legal empowerment as a pathway to meaningful co-creation of justice solutions. This session showcased practical models of collaboration between civil society and government at local levels, demonstrating how such approaches can be scaled and made sustainable. Consequently, Aimee Ongeso, former Network Manager at the Grassroots Justice Network, mooted the idea to the OGP Access to Justice team to bring local voices into the OGP spaces for inclusivity and to demystify the myth. Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Senegal were earmarked for the pilot.
Together, we achieve what we cannot alone. This initiative focuses mainly on strategic stakeholder engagement. At the heart of the Grassroots Justice Network is a community, and we reach across borders to support one another. Reflecting this spirit, the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) in Ghana, a network member and beneficiary of the Network’s learning initiatives in Africa, took the lead in working with local communities, national NGOs, relevant government agencies including the Ministry of Interior, the Legal Aid Commission, and the OGP Ghana Secretariat to draft and validate Ghana’s first commitment under NAP5 of OGP, advancing justice for all.
Localization model in action: LRC, in collaboration with the OGP Ghana Secretariat, convened local and community-based organizations from the northern sector and the south-eastern part of Ghana through a series of in-person peer exchange sessions. These engagements were designed to both strengthen participants’ understanding of the OGP process and create a participatory platform for dialogue, reflection, and co-creation.
The sessions were facilitated using interactive methods, including peer learning, group discussions, and experience-sharing, drawing on lessons from the Kenya OGP process as a practical reference point. Rather than a one-directional training, the process enabled community civil society organizations (CSOs) to interrogate the proposed priorities, share lived experiences from their communities, and identify justice gaps that required urgent attention.
Through this consultative process, participants collectively reviewed and refined the five initial priority areas. A consensus emerged around two key justice priorities. These priorities were shaped by both national policy considerations and grassroots realities. Notably, inputs from community CSOs helped emphasize the need for alternatives to incarceration for minor offenses and the importance of strengthening legal aid systems through community-based approaches.
As a result, the commitments were narrowed and co-developed as follows:
This approach demonstrates how local CSOs meaningfully shaped the priorities and content of the commitments, reinforcing their ownership of the process and strengthening the legitimacy of their continued engagement in subsequent OGP processes.
In developing the commitments, representatives from the Ministry of Interior, Legal Aid Commission, community-based organizations, LRC, and the Grassroots Justice Network collaboratively drafted two justice commitments, drawing on consensus from both community and national engagements. These commitments were validated by all key stakeholders, including the OGP Secretariat, OGP Steering Committee members, and the conveners of the justice commitments, thus the Ministry of Interior and the Legal Aid Commission. Civil society organizations involved in the validation included community-based organizations that participated in the OGP capacity-building workshops in the Northern and Volta zones, as well as national CSOs. Following this process, the justice commitments were validated and included in Ghana’s NAP 5.
The co-creation process resulted in two priority commitments:
These commitments are demonstrative of a shift towards people-centered justice aimed at addressing both systemic inefficiencies and barriers to access.
Progress demands deep roots and sustained commitment over time.
From this journey, we conclude that legal empowerment allows ordinary people to uphold their values, co-create solutions, and build trust in institutions. By equipping individuals with the tools to organize and collaborate with institutions, legal empowerment empowers communities to drive change themselves, rather than relying on powerful figures to act on their behalf.