[Ghana] Poverty Index identifies 18 poorest districts

from The Ghanaian Chronicle

The Social Enterprise Development Foundation (SEND), a non-governmental organization, has launched an intensive education programme in the Volta and Eastern regions to educate the public on the government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy I and II, as well as projects funded by the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Fund.

To achieve its target, workshops would be organized especially for the people in the rural areas, towns and cities to drum home government’s efforts to make life more comfortable for the people.

The Field Officer for SEND, Daniel Dunya, made these known at a workshop of trainers of trainees for 19 participants, mostly district planners and members of civil society groups from the Volta and Eastern regions here recently.

The participants came from Krachi East and West, Jasikan, Ketu, Akatsi, North and South Tongu, Asuogyamang, Manya Krobo and the Afram Plains districts.

He said his outfit had identified food crop farmers, persons with disabilities, the youth and urban unemployed youth, as well as civil society organizations to appreciate this intervention of government and the need to embrace and support them to help improve their standards of living.

According to Dunya, six districts in the Volta, three in the Eastern, two in the Greater Accra, and seven in the Central region have been identified as the poorest areas based on the poverty index developed by the National Development Planning Commission.

He said Krachi East and West Jasikan, South and North Tongu, Akatsi and Ketu districts in the Volta region; Asuogyamang, Afram Plains and Manya Krobo in the Eastern region; Dangme East and West in the Greater Accra; and Twifu/Hemang/Lower Denkyire, Komenda/Edina/Eguafo/Abriem, Gomoa,Abura/Asiebu/Kwamakese, Asikuma/Odoben/Brakwa, Ajumako/Eyan/Essiem and Agona districts in the Central region as areas where their educational activities would be mostly concentrated.

A resource Person and Principal Development Officer at the Volta Regional Coordinating Council, (VRCC), E.K. Kanfra, said the Ghana Poverty Reduction I (GPRS I) has achieved stability and GPRS II would concentrate on growth to ensure accelerated development between 2006 and 2009.

He said Ghana’s development plans targeted one thousand dollar per capita income, which he said was a long-term vision, to be achieve by the year 2015, to make Ghana a middle income earning nation.

He pointed out that the failure of the country to achieve its development plans could partly be attributed to lack of monitory and evaluation of projects, adding that GPRS I and II had a mechanism to ensure a successful implementation of the programme.

One area of concern of the Principal Planning Officer was the fact that most Ghanaians had failed to live up to their civic responsibilities, noting that the bane of the country’s development could be attributed to unpatriotic attitudes of the citizenry.

Kanfra suggested that to improve on the 5% growth in GPRS I to 8% the country needed to be more focused, and stressed the need for attitudinal change towards issues that affect the country.

He also observed that to ensure accelerated growth, the private sector needed to be supported through an improved agriculture as the engine of growth.

The GPRS II, he stressed, would not encourage the youth to look for jobs in industries but rather take up agriculture as a business.

He hinted that during the registration exercise of the unemployed, 60 per cent of those who wrote their names were farmers, noting that farming needed to be divested from cocoa cultivation to other food and economic crop production such as mango, avocado pear, orange and cashew to help generate more income for the farmer.

For their part, the workshop participants expressed concern about the lack of education, especially at the grassroots, which to them culminated in the youth regarding agriculture as a preserve for the illiterate and hopeless in society.

They stressed the need to change that mentality through regular education programmes to make farming more interesting and rewarding.

They also suggested that educational institutions should tailor their syllabi to embrace agriculture so that the youth would understand at an earlier stage that it was a paying business.