Asunafo North Assembly Turns to Digital Tools to Close Revenue Gap
The Asunafo North Municipal Assembly in the Ahafo Region has rolled out a new software platform to overhaul how it collects local revenue, a move officials describe as critical to closing a widening gap between projected income and actual collections.
The DL-Rev Software, introduced after an intensive two-day training workshop for 24 assembly members, is designed to modernise revenue mobilisation and create a reliable digital database for tracking payments across the municipality. The initiative signals a growing recognition among local government authorities in Ghana that manual record-keeping and fragmented collection systems are no longer sufficient to meet rising expenditure demands.
Municipal Chief Executive Joseph Akparibo, delivering his sessional address at the first ordinary meeting of the third session of the Assembly in Goaso, did not shy away from the numbers. Revenue collection for the first quarter of 2026 stood at GH₢1.36 million against a budgeted target of GH₢5.29 million — a collection rate of roughly 25.7 per cent, well below the expected quarterly benchmark.
A critical review of the Assembly’s books revealed significant underperformance in revenue from fines, rent, and fees. The shortfall is more than an accounting inconvenience. Asunafo North, like many municipal assemblies across Ghana, depends heavily on its Internally Generated Fund to bridge infrastructure gaps. When revenue underperforms, roads stay unpaved, clinics remain unbuilt, and water systems go undrilled.
The software deployment is part of a broader strategy that also includes the formation of a dedicated Revenue Monitoring Taskforce. The taskforce will oversee revenue collectors in the field, enforce accountability, and help plug the leakages that have long plagued local government revenue systems. For a municipality currently funding projects across communities including Mpamase, Fianko, Bonkoni, Yankyera, and Domeabra — ranging from CHPS compounds and classroom blocks to mechanised boreholes — every cedi matters.
The MCE warned that while many communities face severe infrastructure deficits, the Assembly can only scale up development projects if local revenue generation improves dramatically. It is a message that echoes across dozens of district assemblies nationwide, where ambitious development plans routinely collide with sluggish collection machinery.
Beyond revenue, the Assembly is also confronting the challenge of illegal mining, which continues to threaten water bodies and farmland in parts of the municipality. Akparibo, who chairs the Municipal Security Council, said surveillance has been intensified to clamp down on galamsey activities. In a notable policy shift, the Assembly plans to transition willing miners in areas such as Tweapease, Manukrom No. 2, and Beakyeasua into the formal sector through the Community Cooperative Mining Scheme. The approach — bringing informal miners into a regulated framework rather than relying solely on enforcement — has been discussed as a potential model elsewhere in the country, though similar efforts to formalise mining have faced significant obstacles.
The Assembly also highlighted contributions from the Asunafo North Municipal Cocoa Cooperative and Marketing Union, which recently partnered on the commissioning of classroom blocks at Edwinase M/A Basic School and Anwianwia Methodist JHS, as well as a four-unit teachers’ quarters at Manukrom M/A Basic School.
The deployment of DL-Rev Software reflects a quiet but important trend in Ghana’s local governance landscape: the slow digitisation of public financial management. Whether the technology translates into meaningfully higher collections will depend on enforcement, political will, and the willingness of residents to pay what they owe. Software alone cannot fix a broken social contract between citizens and their local authorities. But it can, at the very least, make the gaps harder to ignore.
Image Source: MYJOYONLINE
