World Bank to help Ghana implement social protection policy
The World Bank is to help Ghana implement a sustainable social protection and labour (SPL) policy.
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Together with Ghanaian officials, the bank has also agreed to consider four programmes as the core flagship interventions of the Ghana SPL.
They are the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) and the Labour Intensive Public Works (LIPW) programmes, National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) exemptions and the Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP).
The Director of Social Protection and Labour Global Practice (GSPDR) at the World Bank, Ms Xiaoqing Yu, made this known at the closing ceremony of a reverse mission in Washington, with live participation from the World Bank office in Accra.
According to the bank, an effective implementation of SPL policies would help Ghana reduce extreme poverty by 50 per cent by 2025.
Reverse mission
The reverse mission provides a platform for Ghana to brief the World Bank on the achievements and challenges in the implementation of social protection (SP) programmes in the country.
It is also to give the country an opportunity to learn from other countries how to strengthen its SPL policies.
Officials of the ministries of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP), Finance, and Local Government and Rural Development represented the country.
The reverse mission, which was on the theme: "Safety nets in Ghana — Innovation and Successes", also saw countries such as Chile, Tanzania, Brazil, El-Salvador, India, Pakistan, among others, present their social protection strategies to the bank.
On Ghana, Ms Yu said some of the measures agreed upon at the reverse mission included the need to scale up SPL flagship projects nationwide to cover all the extreme poor, with a special focus on the LEAP and the LIPW programmes.
Narrowing inequality gap with SP
The Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Nana Oye Lithur, in an address beamed from Washington, DC, USA, said the country had adopted SP as a major tool to address poverty, vulnerability and exclusion, adding that “this underscores our desire to develop a policy and subsequently a law to ensure the sustainability of our SP interventions”.
She said the reverse mission acknowledged that if social protection interventions were adequately designed and implemented, they would contribute to socio-economic development and also narrow the inequality gap.
That, she said, had clearly pointed out the need for proper coordination of all social protection programmes in the country and the development of a policy that would provide the overall institutional framework for implementation, coordination, monitoring and evaluation of SP programmes in the country.
Nana Lithur said the participation of Ghana in the reserve mission had benefited the country immensely, since it would help ensure better coordination of SP at the policy, programme and implementation levels to enhance the system’s approach and the achievement of results.
For her part, a Deputy Minister of Finance, Mrs Mona Quartey, said the country had made significant progress with regard to its effort to reduce poverty through social protection programmes but added that the country still had a long way to go and a lot more to learn from other countries.
Among others, she asked for efficient measures to be introduced in social protection spending with regard to resource allocation and cost of delivering the programmes.
