Cecil Ato Kwamena Dadzie challenges Ghana’s Development Sector to rethink participation

It is one of the most common words in Ghana’s development sector. It appears in proposals, logframes, monitoring reports, and donor communications. It shapes how projects are designed, how budgets are allocated, and how success is measured.

But according to Communications, Project, and Knowledge Management Specialist Cecil Ato Kwamena Dadzie, the word “beneficiary” is doing more damage than most practitioners realise.“To call someone a beneficiary is to define them by what they receive rather than what they contribute,” Mr. Dadzie said in an interview.

“It positions communities as passive recipients of external goodwill, waiting at the end of a pipeline designed, funded, and managed by people who often live far from the realities they are trying to change.”Mr. Dadzie, a 2025 U.S. State Department International Visitor Leadership Programme (IVLP) Fellow with nearly two decades of experience in Ghana’s development sector, argues that the framing is so deeply embedded in practice that it has become invisible to the professionals who use it daily.

But language, he contends, shapes behaviour. And the behaviour of treating communities as beneficiaries is one of the reasons so many development projects in Ghana fail to outlast the organisations that implement them.The gap between participatory language and participatory practiceGhana’s development sector is not short on the language of participation. Terms such as “community entry,” “stakeholder consultation,” and “participatory needs assessment” populate virtually every project design document.

However, research suggests a persistent gap between these terms and the reality on the ground.A study conducted in the Ajumako-Enyan-Essiam District found that both development agencies and community members “participated” in projects as a means to an end: agencies to meet externally set welfare targets, and communities to address immediate socio-economic needs. Neither side was genuinely co-creating the intervention.Mr. Dadzie said this pattern repeats across the country. “Communities are consulted after designs are finalised. They are invited to durbars where plans are presented, not discussed.

They contribute labour or counterpart funding, which is recorded as ‘participation,’ while the substantive decisions about what gets built, where, and for whom have already been made in offices they have never entered.”He pointed out that the exclusion runs even deeper for marginalised groups. “Project consultation formats often fail to account for accessibility. Meetings are held in locations, languages, and at times that systematically exclude persons with disabilities, out-of-school girls, and women in rural communities. This is not participation. It is notification dressed in participatory language.”What co-creation would look like in practiceMr. Dadzie argued that genuine co-creation requires a fundamentally different starting point.

Rather than asking “What does this community need?” from the outside, project designers should be asking communities directly: “What do you know, what do you want, and how should we work together to achieve it?”In practical terms, he said, this means involving communities in project design, not just implementation. It means creating feedback mechanisms that communities actually use, not suggestion boxes that nobody opens, but ongoing dialogue that shapes how a project evolves over its lifecycle. It also means ensuring that traditional power structures, such as chieftaincy institutions, do not monopolise the community voice at the expense of women, youth, and persons with disabilities.He noted that Ghana’s own cultural traditions already provide models for the kind of collective action that co-creation demands.

“The ‘nnoboa’ system among the Ashanti and the ‘Kotaar’ among the Dagaaba are indigenous models of mutual support and collective ownership. The infrastructure for co-creation already exists in our culture. Development practice simply needs to stop bypassing it.”Why the language mattersMr. Dadzie was emphatic that the distinction between “beneficiary” and “co-creator” is not merely semantic. He argued that the terminology used in project documents functions as an instruction to the entire project team.“When a project document calls someone a beneficiary, it instructs the team to relate to that person as a recipient. When it calls them a co-creator, a partner, or a stakeholder with agency, it instructs the team to listen, negotiate, and share power,” he said.He linked this directly to the problem of project sustainability.

“Projects that treat communities as co-creators are more likely to achieve the ownership that sustains outcomes after the funding ends. When people have shaped a decision, they defend it. When they have been handed a decision, they tolerate it until it becomes inconvenient, then they walk away.”This, he argued, explains why boreholes break down months after commissioning, why school blocks sit empty, and why health outreach programmes collapse the moment the implementing organisation withdraws.

“Not because communities are ungrateful or incapable, but because they were never given a meaningful role in the process that was supposed to serve them.”A challenge to donors and implementing agenciesMr. Dadzie directed his challenge at both the funding and implementing ends of Ghana’s development pipeline. He called on donors to stop rewarding project designs that promise participation but measure only outputs, and on implementing agencies to invest in the time, skills, and resources that genuine co-creation demands.“Communities are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with development. They are full of knowledge, capacity, and agency,” he said. “The question is whether we will design projects that recognise this, or whether we will continue building interventions for people rather than with them, and wondering why nothing lasts.”