Next week, December 16 and 17, Ghana will host an Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) forum. The discussion will center on social development and is appropriately themed “Societal Vulnerability – The Social Inclusion Challenges of Environmental Change,”Ghana News Agency reported.

Social development ministers from ECOWAS partner states will participate in the forum for the third year. The leaders who specialize in various areas of social development expressed that the hope is for the conversation to spur an exchange of national practices.

“This event will thus offer opportunities for co-production of knowledge through presentations by, and discussions among all policy-makers and stakeholders involved on regional social policy strategies,” Nana Oye Lithur, Ghana’s Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection told Ghana News Agency.

“It will allow, inter alia, to share with all participants the results of an important project developed by UNESCO in two countries of the region: Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal,” she said.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) MOST programme (Management of Social Transformations), will likely benefit from strategies covered at the forum. Oye Lithur is expecting for two of MOST’s themes — social inclusion and Social transformations arising from global environmental change — to be thoroughly addressed at the event.

“To the patterns of social inclusion and exclusion that they reflect and transform, this third forum will contribute to the knowledge-base for socially inclusive environmental adaptation policies, which constitute a recognized development priority for the ECOWAS member states,” she added.

According to Ghana News Agency, the ministers will adopt a new policy to be hashed out through research following the social development forum.