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• Addressing socio-economic challenges as a means to
prevent organized crime. Anti-organized crime efforts
should comprehensively address conditions of poverty,
inequality, unemployment, and underemployment,
especially among the youth in urban areas as well as
marginalized communities. This requires an updated
and comprehensive national youth policy that gives
particular attention to youth employment and
development in the national development agenda,
as well as improving and expanding service delivery
through increased allocation of development funds
to especially to deprived communities. Donors could
assist youth development by increasing investments in
microfinance and venture capital schemes that provide
financial, logistical, and technical assistance to youthled
ventures.
• Building civil society resilience against organized
crime. Donors can support civil society efforts to build
resilience against organized crime. For example, the
support of popular celebrities and morally upright
public figures and opinion leaders should be enlisted
to help increase public awareness with focus on the
dire political, economic, social, and health implications
of organized crime and drug trafficking. Given their
enormous power and loyalty at their command in
Ghanaian society, traditional rulers in particular should
be encouraged to feature anti-crime and anti-drug
messages in festivals, durbars, and other interactions
with members of their communities. For example,
gaining their support for efforts to sensitize banking
and financial operators including forex bureaus and
local ‘susu’ collectors on the nature and effects of
laundering money is likely to yield positive results.
Such efforts can also serve the double objective of
sensitizing traditional leaders to the longer-term
impacts of organized crime as a means to disincentivize
encouragement of organized criminal activity. Donors
can also lay down support to develop the capacity of
investigative journalists on organized crime-related
issues. Ensuring sufficient safeguards are put in place
will be imperative.
• Strengthening the empirical base as a means to
inform domestic policy. Donors should support
efforts to gather, analyze and regularly update baseline
data in major gap areas such as drug consumption and
treatment, violence and organized crime, and public
sector corruption and organized crime. Such data are
imperative for monitoring trends and formulating
appropriate policy responses that are in tune with
domestic and regional needs circumstances.
• Investing in innovative approaches to education
and training. Rather than just traditional skills training,
donors could support the implementation of innovative,
interactive courses on the nature and dynamics of
organized crime, drug trafficking, money laundering,
and the impact of these phenomena on society.
Specialized training tailored to the social and cultural
realities of Ghana on intelligence gathering, criminal
intelligence and data analysis, criminal investigation,
and prosecution are equally important. Courses should
especially target law enforcement and judicial units
outside Accra, as well as political parties, parliamentary
committees, social services agencies, and civil society
groups.
• Strengthening the rule of law. Finally, these
recommendations will only be effective and productive
if they seriously consider the duality in the Ghanaian
legal and governance systems, namely the existence
of the modern/formal state based on legal concepts
that are often viewed as alien to the Ghanaian way of
life alongside a powerful traditional/informal state that
embodies Ghanaian customs and traditions and wields
the allegiance of the populace. Traditional chiefs, elders
and family heads, queen-mothers, and opinion leaders
should be consulted and mobilized; and interventions
must be carefully tailored to reflect existing ethnic and
cultural norms.
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Responding to the Impact of Organized Crime on Developing Countries
NYU
CIC