World Bank supports Ghana

GHANA has received $88.6 million from the World Bank to generate employment and increase income to the poor.
The credit facility is also to improve social protection spending and increase access to employment and cash revenue for the rural poor during agricultural off-seasons by improving economic and social infrastructure.
The Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Mr Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, made this known to the Daily Graphic last Friday when he was travelling to India and Ethiopia as the head of a delegation to interact with his counterparts in those countries on how they had achieved success in similar programmes.
The World Bank suggested the trip to India and Ethiopia for the delegation to able to tap the experiences of the two countries in the area of using public works to achieve dramatic results in fighting extreme poverty through effective targeting and payment systems.
Mr Ofosu-Ampofo explained that Ghana had, over the years, adopted a national social protection strategy (NSPS) with the aim of protecting the poorest and vulnerable segment of society and that a number of instruments under that strategy had been developed and implemented.
They include the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP), the capitation grant, the school feeding programme, free school uniforms and free maternal care for pregnant women.
However, those programmes, he said, needed to be anchored on a vision that enabled a graduation of the very poor households out of poverty, exploiting synergies among programmes and strengthening their complementarities.
The minister explained that it was for that reason that the government sought for the credit facility from the World Bank, adding that that required that the country graduated the very poor out of their poverty.
He said the new move, which had four components, had the potential of lifting the people out of the safety nets to a level of self-dependency.
While in India and Ethiopia, the delegation will learn about the various social protection instruments being applied on the programmes and how they have been rationalised to achieve synergy and also learn about the payment system being applied on labour intensive public works and the modalities guiding the systems and their effectiveness and efficiency.
The study will also include the strategies being applied by the two countries for cash transfers, as well as to select workforce from cash transfer beneficiaries.
The outcome of the visit will be a clearer understanding of the factors that influenced their policy initiatives and lessons that Ghana could take advantage of.