Over the past few years, the world has witnessed tremendous changes and growth in poverty reduction and sustainable development.
Third world countries are taking sustainable steps to alleviating poverty.
Ghana, like many other African countries, has had its fair share of sustained and inclusive growth which has led to the reduction of the poverty rate by half.
The new World Bank poverty assessment has recorded a reduction from 52.6% to 21.45 between 1991 and 2013. Although several efforts have been made to end the vicious cycle of poverty, Ghana is still fraught with several challenges.
According to “Poverty Reduction in Ghana: Progress and challenges” sustained poverty reduction requires a commitment to reducing inequality and improving access to opportunities for all citizens.
Governance and poverty reduction is a sine qua non situation. A holistic participatory approach must be adopted by government and stakeholders that involves the poor. This must take place within a framework of good governance.
Policymakers must make it a point to promote a public consultation that cuts across the country. A country can experience a significant level of economic growth and the governance model will still not be considered good to reduce the rate of poverty because economic growth is not a model for measuring poverty rate.
Countries with good models of governance and economic growth have shown increasing trends of poverty alleviation.
Ghana, with her vast resources, has not been able to improve the lives of her people for reasons that can be attributed to lack of transparency, disregard for the end users during policy implementation and lack of accountability. Implementing social interventions such as the LEAP program which seeks to alleviate poverty in the short term does not translate to poverty reduction in the long term.
This is because Ghana’s currency coupled with high rate of inflation loses its purchasing value; hence sums of money given to families today may depreciate in value tomorrow.
Government should identify key areas of growth for rural communities where the rate of poverty is way higher than in the urban communities, and implement systems that only seek to provide people with monthly stipends, but economic activities where community members by exhibiting community ownership are empowered to be productive in order to sustain development overtime.
Government should laboriously ensure that all anti-corruption strategies are fully functioning to ensure transparency and effective management of Ghana resources.
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By: Adelaide Yiriyelleh