Congratulations to Hilda Agyekum, who is the recipient of the Cherry Gertzel Bursary Award for 2023.

Hilda is a PhD student at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. She is working on the topic: we are part of development; the implementation of disability policies in Ghana and Australia. She hopes to explore the challenges of implementing disability policies in local context taking into consideration the influence of culture, resources, power, divergent voices, and politics on implementation. Hilda’s study will focus on the employment and education sector, while analyzing accessibility and physical spaces in these sectors. The promotion of the human development of people with disability make these sectors an instrumental focus for the study.

This study is a continuation of Hilda’s master’s thesis from the University of Ghana, where she obtained a Master of Art in Social Policy. She looked at the level of implementation of the disability act of Ghana exploring this in the education, employment, and transportation sectors. Her master’s thesis found that the level of implementation of the disability act is influenced by the perception Ghanaians have on disability, as the perception Ghanaians have determined their willingness to meet disability standards.

Hilda’s PhD project is influenced by this assumption: if perception influences the level of implementation, then perception/context will also influence the evaluation of the outcomes of implementation. That being said, she will be exploring how the context affects the implementation process, outcomes, and impact of the policy. To Hilda, development is defined and experienced differently by people based on their context; hence her selection of Ghana and Australia as two different case sites. This study will inform disability and development practitioners on how to navigate the complexities of implementation to enhance policy implementation outcomes.

Before joining the ANU, Hilda was a research, monitoring, evaluation and learning officer with a development research firm in Ghana. During her time there, she developed her professional skills in research especially in the development space, which was a useful experience since she only had experience from academic works (undergraduate and master’s). Hilda has, over the years, engaged in disability studies in academics, though her work allowed her to study other groups of people. Going forward, she would like to grow a career in the disability research space, looking specifically at implementation. She finds that a lot of research goes into evaluation of policies and how to bridge the gap between expected and achieved outcomes, without much focus on the implementation process. Hilda would like to contribute to both theoretical, and essentially, practitioner knowledge on implementation, with the hope of bridging outcome gaps.

Thank you to the AFSAAP Selection Committee for their assessment of the applications and outcome recommendation.