The Ministry of Local Government, Decentralisation and Rural Development has launched a three-year World Bank-funded project aimed at increasing access to jobs and reducing obstacles to growth.

Known as the Ghana Productive Safety Net Project 2 (GPSNP2), it has been designed to empower extremely poor households through sustainable productivity and improve income through the promotion of entrepreneurship.

The $250 million project is being implemented in collaboration with the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection in 120 districts throughout the country. It would strengthen the safety net systems in the country and enhance the effectiveness of the country’s flagship social protection programmes.  

Orientation

As part of efforts to ensure a successful and effective implementation, the ministry has organised an orientation for engineers and planners for the new districts that have been added to the project to educate them on the project guidelines and objectives. 

The project comprises two key components: Productive inclusion and labour-intensive public works where beneficiaries would be equipped with economic interventions that would generate income to improve their livelihood.

The Director in charge of Policy Planning and Monitoring at the Ministry of Local Government, Eric Tetteh-Addison, explained that the GPSNP2 was to assist extremely poor households to work their way out of poverty and the beneficiaries would be selected mainly from social protection programmes such as Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) and Labour Intensive Public Works (LIPW).

He said the beneficiaries were those within the age brackets of 18-65 years, with priority to women and Persons with Disability (PWD). The selected beneficiaries, according to Mr Tetteh-Addison, would be trained on their chosen skills and given financial support on the productive inclusion component of the initiative to enable them to become self-reliant to minimise poverty in their respective areas.

“For the labour-intensive component, we look for interventions within the communities and the people who are healthy but lack access to jobs. “The Assemblies will identify an intervention within the community, for instance, construction of feeder roads, we will use the people and pay them. So instead of using machines, we will use the people in the community and at the end of the day, the money will go to the people to better their lives,” he explained.

Successful phase

The Director said the GPSNP1, which ended in 2021, was implemented in 80 districts due to the limited financial resources. However, he said, following its huge impact, the government sought additional funding for its continuation and expanded it to cover more districts.

The National Coordinator for the project, Prof. Prosper Basommi Laari, said the GPSNP2 was purposely designed for rural communities to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor.

He said the second phase or the continuation of the project resulted from the successful implementation of the GPSNP1 which positively impacted the lives of beneficiaries and the communities.