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Miss Emelia Arthur, District Chief Executive for Shama, has suggested that assembly members should be properly resourced to enable them to perform their duties effectively. She said though the assembly members were diligently performing their functions, they lacked the resources to make them effective and this was affecting local governance at the grassroots. Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency at Shama, Ms Arthur said assembly members were the first point of contact in the society adding; �The district assemblies are the local parliament of the respective areas and to be operating without a standardised funding stifles their effectiveness�. Ms Arthur said the decentralisation process begun at the unit committee level and if the sub-sectors were not funded to perform effectively, policy implementation and the dissemination of several government policies and programmes would not be achieved. She admitted that though there were about 16,000 assembly members nationwide, efforts must be made by Parliament to vote a certain amount of money for their operations. She said this would enable the various assemblies to attract and retain people who were ready to work for the development of grassroots democracy.