The IMF Mission Chief for Ghana, Stéphane Roudet, has characterised the country’s Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) Programme as “very effective.”
In his view, the programme is one of Ghana’s social interventions that is doing very well.
He made the remarks in an interview on the Point of View on Citi TV on Monday.
According to him, the IMF has had discussions with the government on how to increase the benefits of the programme.
“In the 2023 budget, there was a significant increase in the level of benefits for the LEAP programme. We consider this programme as a very effective one and so we discussed with the authorities how to make sure that we reserve in the context of the budget the resources needed to increase the level of benefits,” Mr Roudet said.
The Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) is a cash transfer programme introduced by the Government of Ghana (GOG) in 2008, for extremely poor and vulnerable households which have the following three categories of eligible members:
The main objective of the LEAP Program is to reduce poverty by increasing and smoothening consumption and promoting access to services and opportunities among the extremely poor and vulnerable.
The determination of the level of poverty is done objectively employing a Proxy Means Test (PMT) Score calculated from data collected on potential beneficiaries by the PMT questionnaires.
By: Rashid Obodai Provencal/Rainbowradioonline.com/Ghana