Govt implements 44 social protection interventions
The Government is implementing 44 different social protection interventions to reduce poverty and bridge the inequality gap in the country.
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These interventions include the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP), the Ghana School Feeding Programme, the National Health Insurance Scheme, the Capitation Grant, Free School Uniform, Free Exercise books and the Labour Intensive public works.
The Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Nana Oye Lithur, announced this at a public lecture on “Social protection, a strategic tool for poverty reduction and bridging the inequality gap in Ghana”.
Public lecture
The lecture, organised by the ministry in collaboration with the Centre for Social Policy Studies (CSPS), College of Humanities of the University of Ghana, was to seek knowledge and advice from the academia and scholars in the field of social protection. It was also to create a forum for Ghana to learn at first hand how the Government of Brazil was able to implement, its social protection interventions successfully.
Various interventions
Nana Oye Lithur said for instance, that the NHIS had registered and was providing free healthcare for over one million vulnerable beneficiaries, while over 88,908 persons had been employed under the labour intensive public works with 52,177 of them being women.
On the LEAP, the minister announced that from 1,645 beneficiary households in 2007, the number had increased to 77,006 as of October 30, 2014 and was expected to hit 90,000 by December 31, 2014.
Other programmes, the minister said, were the school feeding programme providing 1.6 million pupils with one hot nutritious meal a day, which had increased school enrolment, attendance and retention by 80 per cent, while 38,751 farmers were benefiting from the block farming agricultural programme and were cultivating 30,973.8 hectares.
Importance of social interventions
Nana Oye Lithur explained that such programmes were critical because social protection had become an indispensable part of the government’s responsibility towards its citizens and was key to helping the reduction of poverty in line with the country’s Millenium Development Goals.
The minister also announced that the ministry had developed and implemented a National Common Targeting Mechanism to identify and select beneficiaries for social protection interventions.
The mechanism, she said was also expected to facilitate the establishment of a National Single Registry for social protection.
A former Brazilian Minister for Social Development and Fight against Hunger, Professor Marcia Helena Carvalho Lopes, who took the participants through the Brazilian experience, stressed that the state was responsible for ensuring that parents took care of their children.
She advised the government to ensure that the vulnerable in the society were covered by basic social protection interventions.
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