Government has defended the relevance of the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty Programme (LEAP) which critics say should be abolished.
The LEAP is Government’s social intervention cash transfer programme for extreme poor households.
The categories of extreme poor beneficiaries are: Orphans and vulnerable children; severely disabled persons without a productive capacity, and the elderly without any source of support.
But the programme has been criticized for what some have described as its inefficiency.
But speaking to Citi News, Programmes Officer for LEAP, Dzigbozi Kofi Agbegbonu said LEAP has been beneficial to majority of Ghanaians and must be maintained.
“What cash transfer programmes like LEAP does is to help people smoothen their consumption… the impact assessment of LEAP indicates that every 1 ghana cedis that is injected into the local community generates about 250 ghana cedis and that is a multiplier effect and even that 250 ghana cedis that is generated is beneficial to the whole community so I will say that it does not breed laziness, it rather helps people to come out of poverty.”
Meanwhile the Deputy Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, John Alexander Ackon has said his Ministry will be “expanding the legibility criteria of the LEAP programme by adding pregnant women and infants in extreme poor households under a ‘LEAP 1000’ initiative.”
He said the Ministry is also in the process of establishing a National Targeting System aimed at “developing a National Single Registry Database of the extreme poor and vulnerable to be called The Ghana National Household Registry.”
According to him, the “database will be used by all Social Protection interventions to select and enroll beneficiaries for their respective interventions”
By: Marian Efe Ansah/citifmonline.com/Ghana