Lawrence Ofori –Addo, LEAP Coordinator
The managers of the government programme that seeks to reduce poverty, Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP), have acknowledged the delays in paying beneficiary households, attributing them to bureaucracies.
LEAP is a programme that enables more people, including the underprivileged in society, to benefit from the unconditional grant of GH¢8.0 to GH¢15 per month.
However, since the programme was started in 2008, beneficiaries have complained about holdups in the cash transfers from government.
Lawrence Ofori-Addo, the LEAP coordinator, spoke to BUSINESS GUIDE in Accra after a workshop for journalists on National Social Protection Strategy, which is to empower society and protect persons living in situations of extreme poverty.
He admitted that there were delays in the payment of the monies to the beneficiaries “and the process is waft with bureaucracies and is slow”.
He also hinted that the manual operation used in compiling the list of beneficiaries and the paper work done by Social Welfare officials at the district level, which accompanied the payments, also contributed to their inability to pay beneficiaries on time.
“It’s a complicated process that even needs police protection when travelling with the money,” said the LEAP coordinator.
He explained that the funds for the programme were released at the central level by the Ministry of Finance, through the Bank of Ghana, to the Ministry of Social Welfare and Employment for onward payment to the recipients.
“The ministry has arranged with the Ghana Post and does the payment through them,” he said, adding, “We send the list with the names of the people with the money to the Ghana Post, which goes to the community with officials from the department of Social Welfare at the district level to pay the money.”
He noted that as a result of the difficulties and challenges that the programme was encountering, “payments are now done every other month instead of every month”.
Currently, the programme, which was first piloted in 2008 to cover 1,654 beneficiary households in 21 districts, now covers 68,000 households in 100 districts across the country.
He stated that the programme was considering ways to address the challenges, stressing, “We are upgrading our software to help us migrate from the manual to electronic means of payments”.
Mr Ofori-Addo said, “We are trying to change things and the way we do things to bring about efficiency in how we pay the cash to the households.”
LEAP was started on a pilot basis in March 2008 as a major National Social Protection Programme (NSPP) to support the vulnerable in society.
The initiative was borne out of reviews of the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategies I and II that sought to target those who were still economically vulnerable after poverty reduction strategies of the early 2000s.
Brenda Laryea Adjapawn, Acting National Coordinator of the National Social Protection Strategy, which serves as a mother body for all the sustainable mechanisms being implemented to reduce poverty in the county, noted that the principle was to empower “every Ghanaian as they matter and have the capability to contribute their quota to national development”.
Though the various programmes such as free school feeding, free school uniforms, national health insurance scheme, LEAP, among others are largely funded by government, they receive support from some development partners such as the World Bank, DfID and UNICEF in the form of technical and capacity building.
By Emelia Ennin Abbey
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