213,000 Households benefit from LEAP
More than 213,000 households in all the 216 districts have been registered under the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme which is aimed at eliminating poverty and malnutrition.
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The Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Nana Oye Lithur, who made this known, said LEAP beneficiaries had also been registered on the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) free of charge.
She was speaking at the second Social Protection Dialogue (SPD) series in Accra yesterday.
The programme is expected to expand to cover an additional 50,000 households by December 2016 under a phase two programme.
Currently, beneficiaries receive between GH¢64 and GH¢100 every other month through cash transfers using E-Zwich cards.
“This achievement of the LEAP programme was graded as an A+ by the British Department for International Development (DFID),” the minister said.
LEAP is one of the five flagship programmes under the National Social Protection Policy with the objective of poverty reduction, income stability and potential for sustaining lives.
The other social intervention programmes are the NHIS, Labour Intensive Public Works (LIPW), Basic School Capitation Grant and the Ghana School Feeding Programme.
LEAP
The SPD series are a periodic forum organised by the Gender Ministry to engage stakeholders, experts and the public on emerging issues on social protection to ensure the sustainable implementation of its intervention programmes.
This year’s series, which focused on the impact evaluation of LEAP and the LIPW, were funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Bank.
On the LIPW, Nana Oye said the programme had directly transferred GH¢70,893, 347.5 to unskilled beneficiaries as wage earnings.
Impact
A Research Fellow of the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), Professor Robert Darko Osei, giving an overview of an impact evaluation conducted on LEAP, said the programme had had a strong impact on the education of children in the beneficiary communities.
“The programme has increased access to schooling at all levels and improved the quality of access”, he said.
He said according to the report, LEAP households were now happier.
The LEAP programme, he explained, targeted households living under conditions of extreme poverty and vulnerability, including persons in special institutions such as leprosarium, witches camps and homes for the elderly.
Another researcher from ISSER, Dr Isaac Osei-Akoto, who took the gathering through the impact of the LIPW, said in addition to engaging people for public works, the programme promoted the use and management of locally available human and material resources for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure.
He said it was found that 88.7 per cent of LIPW beneficiaries were the extreme poor and that the programme had the potential of stemming seasonal migration in the communities, where beneficiaries used their incomes to purchase farm inputs and household consumables.
In a remark, the Country Representative of UNICEF, Madam Susan Namondo Ngongi, said the fund was proud to have been part of the initiative.
The Programme Leader in charge of Human Development of the World Bank, Ms Kathleen Beegle, said the LIPW was achieving the objective of reducing poverty and unemployment in the rural areas, as well as rural-urban migration.
Mrs Grace Badiako, a Commissioner of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), said there was the need for long-term planning and coordination to ensure sustainability of the programme.
Mrs Grace Badiako, a Commissioner of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), said there was the need for long-term planning and coordination to ensure sustainability of the programme.
“There are other things that impoverish us, such as infrastructure, and we need to look at how we can address them,” she added.
