‘LEAP is to complement relief measures’

Saturday, February 2, 2008 Pg 3 (The Mirror)
By Rebecca Kwei
THE Minister of Manpower, Youth and Employment, Nana Akomea, has said that the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) is one of the social protection interventions to complement relief measures for various categories of poor people.
Under the LEAP Direct Cash Transfers will be made available to categories of poor people.
At the Meet-the-Press series organised by the Ministry of Information and National Orientation in Accra, Nana Akomea said the primary target of the LEAP direct cash transfer was 18.2 per cent of the population who had been identified by the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS 5) as falling into the category of extreme poor.
The amounts to be disbursed per month range from GH¢8 to GH¢15 depending on if the extremely poor household also has an orphan, severely disabled person and persons aged more than 65.
Nana Akomea admitted that the direct cash transfer was not the solution to poverty but just a useful complement in national development.
He said poverty came in various ways and there was the need to adopt a multi-structural social protection measures to alleviate it.
He mentioned other policies such as the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Capitation Grant, School Feeding Programme, Mass Transport, Free Bus ride for schoolchildren and micro credit for people with disabilities (PWDs) as examples of social protection measures to enhance livelihood and welfare of the vulnerable and extremely poor.
The LEAP pilot programme will be implemented nationwide from 2008 to 2012 and the rollout will start with 15,000 households this year, scaling up to 164,370.
Targeted individuals in the households would be issued with ID cards and they would receive payments from the nearest post office.
Reacting to concerns that the LEAP was for political patronage, Nana Akomea said the project had been carefully designed by a team of local and international experts and that selection of the households would be done using the GLSS data, district poverty maps and the regional distribution of extreme poor so that the poorest regions would be fairly represented.
Therefore, he said, it would be difficult to select households based on their political affiliation.
He encouraged all stakeholders to monitor the LEAP intervention.
To another concern that the LEAP was being implemented in an election year, he said the planning of LEAP started as far back as 2004 and was to have started last year but could not commence hence this year.