UK lends support to social intervention programmes

SOCIAL intervention programmes are to receive a financial boost with the release of £40 million from the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom to support their implementation.
The funds, which are mainly targeted at boosting the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), the Ghana School Feeding Programme, the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty Programme (LEAP) and the National Programme for the Elimination of Worst Forms of Child Labour in Cocoa (NPECLC), are expected to ensure that those programmes functioned effectively to address the needs of their respective beneficiaries.
A Social Advisor to the DFID, Mr Graham Gass, who disclosed this to the Daily Graphic in Accra on the sidelines of a consultative meeting of civil society organisations (CSOs) in Ghana, organised by Help-Age Ghana under the auspices of the Africa Platform for Social Protection (APSP), however, said the funds could only be released if the DFID satisfied itself that measures were put in place to “sensibly” spend the money.
While commending Ghana for instituting what he described as impressive social intervention programmes to alleviate poverty, which he believed was the best in the region, he expressed concern over the apparent lack of collaboration and team-building among stakeholder and thus, stressed the need for managers of the programmes to work in concert to ensure their effective implementation.
The consultative meeting, which was the third to be held in Africa, brought together stakeholders of social protection agencies on the theme: “Enhancing the participation of CSOs in the fight to reduce poverty among the poor and vulnerable people in Africa through the implementation of the AU Social Policy Framework,” comes on the heels of a similar meeting held in Rwanda and Kenya.
Speakers at the meeting expressed varied concerns over the seeming lack of government commitment to sustain the social intervention programmes and underscored the need for the relevant ministries implementing those programmes to partner towards making poverty alleviation the cornerstone of their focus.
Mr Gass had earlier indicated that the apparent lack of CSOs involvement in the pursuit of social intervention programmes was not serving the interest of vulnerable groups and that it was the duty of the CSOs to pursue the government by ensuring that the different sectors concerned in those programmes “lifted up their game.”
Decrying the level of poverty in Ghana which he pegged at six million people living below the poverty line, Mr Gass, whose organisation is leading the UK Government’s fight against world poverty, said the UK was committed to playing its part in the poverty alleviation strategy for Ghana and on that score, called on relevant institutions to play a complimentary role to realise that feat.
A Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research at the University of Ghana, Dr Ellen Bortei-Doku Aryeetey, in a presentation on; 'Social protection in Ghana', said steps were being taken to prepare a national policy framework for Ghana to maximise the benefits of social protection.
She believed that for the vulnerable to be empowered through the various programmes, there was the need to build their capacity to a level that was sustainable.
Among the challenges Dr Aryeetey identified as militating against the smooth implementation of the social protection programmes were weak monitoring and evaluation mechanisms, absence of public-private-partnership and poor institutional capacity.