A development expert has recommended that Ghana finds ways of deepening collaboration between the agriculture ministry and its allied institutions if it really wants to make headway in linking social protection (SP) with agriculture to reduce poverty and hunger.
The Country Director of SEND Ghana, Mr George Osei-Bimpeh, said that at the moment there was not a strong link between what the agriculture sector is offering and the mainstream SP agencies are offering.
In an interview with the GRAPHIC BUSINESS, he said the above situation was largely because institutional collaboration and coordination had been very weak, “and so we don’t seem to align our SP programmes with the agric sector with a view of targeting women specifically, and persons with disability. These are challenges and these are things that at the moment not happening.”
Mr Osei-Bimpeh was speaking on a new report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), of the United Nations (UN), titled “The State of Food and Agriculture 2015,” that states in poor countries, social protection schemes, such as cash transfers, school feeding and public works, offer an economical way to provide vulnerable people with opportunities to move out of extreme poverty and hunger and to improve their children's health, education and life chances.
He said that unlike between health and SP where Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty programme (LEAP) was used to identify indigenes in order to register them for the purposes of accessing the National Health Insurance (NHI), “in the case of agric there isn’t a clear target of the vulnerable of those in the sector so there isn’t also a clear linkage between what the agric sector is providing and what mainstream SP programmes are also providing.”
SP is a set of interventions to reduce social and economic risk and vulnerability, and alleviate
extreme poverty and deprivation.
SP and agriculture to reduce poverty and hunger
Mr Osei-Bimpeh said that basically, what SP looked at the vulnerable groups in society to provide them with access to basic services and so when its is linked with agriculture, then it is addressing the nutritional needs while ensuring that the selected individual have access to basic social services.
“In this case you are building the social capital of such individuals and as you link agric to that it means that you are using an isolated poverty reduction approach so that your attempts to reduce poverty is not only one dimension of it than looking at all forms of it,” he said.
Although the report mentions economic growth as a key factor in reducing poverty and hunger, it said that alone was not sufficient but needed to be inclusive to reach the poorest.
“Yes in the sense that where growth is not inclusive it’s only in the service sector and the service sector doesn’t employ vulnerable groups. In that case growth is not inclusive. Inclusive growth should be perused in terms of making sure that all the sectors in the economy of the population benefits from the growth that you generate,” he said.
SP and dependency
Mr Osei-Bimpeh said SP did not foster dependency per se but was used as way of building capacities beneficiaries to be on their own.
In this way, at any point in time, he said there should be a clear plan of exiting while ensuring that they do not just exit from programmes but they exit with newly acquired skills and capital that have been accumulated over the years.
“If we are able to do that then we cannot say that it creates dependency. However, if we fail to do that and we also fail to ensure strong monitoring of the utilisation of such intervention then we only succeed in just providing protection without talking about how people can begin to depend on themselves. Of course that is where it creates a dependency syndrome,” he said.
The FAO report
It was released on the eve of World Food Day (October 16, 2015), and focuses on SP’s role in breaking the cycle of rural poverty.
It said such programmes currently benefit 2.1 billion people in developing countries in various ways, including keeping 150 million people out of extreme poverty.
“Expanding such programs in rural areas and linking them to inclusive agricultural growth policies would rapidly reduce the number of poor people,” the report said.
A news release quoted the FAO Director-General, Mr José Graziano da Silva, as saying that it was urgent to act to support the most vulnerable people in order to free the world of hunger.
“Social protection programs allow households to access more food - often by increasing what they grow themselves -- and also make their diets more diverse and healthier. These programs can have positive impacts on infant and maternal nutrition, reduce child labor and raise school attendance, all of which increase productivity,” he said. GB
Writer’s email: ama.baafi@graphic.com.gh
Pull Quote
Expanding such programs in rural areas and linking them to inclusive agricultural growth policies would rapidly reduce the number of poor people.
Key Note
Social protection protects the poor and prevents worse deprivation.
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