The Head of Social and Demographic Statistics and Coordinator of Data for SDGs at the Ghana Statistics Service, Omar Seidu has urged the government to adopt a district-by-district targeted approach in its policies aimed at reducing poverty in the country.

According to him, it would be difficult on the part of the government to address poverty in the country if the government continued to adopt one single approach to all the districts in the country.

He emphasized that the government would make effective and efficient gains in its effort to address poverty in the country if it deals with each district separately by identifying its specific problems and providing the needed policies and programmes to address such problems

“Over the years you realize that poverty policies somehow were the same program for different areas but with this report, you will appreciate that if you should go into the same district, different parts of the district are experiencing multidimensional poverty differently. This means that each of these communities would have to be targeted differently if you want to accelerate the gains in alleviating poverty. This is exactly why we have published this report so that there would be conscious efforts in targeting different parts of the country differently”
Omar Seidu

GSS Pegs 23 Districts Poverty Rate At 50% In Its Multidimensional Poverty Index Scorecard

The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has indicated that about 23 districts in the country have over 50% of its population multidimensionally poor.

In its latest publication of the Multidimensional Poverty Index Scorecard for all 261 Administrative Districts, the Ghana Statistical Service revealed that the Nabdam District in the Upper East Region has the highest rate of ‘multidimensional poverty’ with a prevalence of 68.6%, which is about 11 times higher than the lowest recorded of 6.3% in the Asokwa Municipality in the Ashanti Region.

According to the report, there is at least a 20.0 percentage point difference in the incidence of multidimensional poverty with the highest disparity in Kwahu Afram Plains North 38 percentage points) across 55 of the districts with both rural and urban residential settlements,

Again, multidimensional poverty is higher for female-headed households compared to male-headed households in nine out of every 10 districts in the country.

The Ghana Statistical Service attributed the principal contributors to multidimensional poverty across districts as employment for 206 districts and insurance coverage for 55 districts.

The report indicated that employment contributes between 22.9 per cent and 56.7 per cent across the 206 districts, while insurance coverage contributes between 23.5 per cent and 29.7 per cent across the 55 districts.

The publication of the scorecards on multidimensional poverty for all 261 districts in the country by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) is part of its 2023 African Statistics Day commemorative activities.

According to the Ghana Statistical Service, the ‘multidimensional poverty’ indicator is a non-monetary deprivation measure that comprises 13 indicators in four dimensions including living conditions which comprises electricity, housing, assets, overcrowding, cooking fuel, water, and toilet facility; education which involves attendance, attainment, and school lag; health which also comprise insurance coverage and mortality rate; and lastly employment which comprises of work for wage or profit.

The district scorecards provide statistics on the proportion of the population within the district that lives in multidimensionally poor households, experiencing multidimensional poverty, and the ranking of the district relative to other districts in the region and all districts in the country.

The scorecard also presents information on the areas in which poor persons in the district are most deprived. The data was sourced from the 2021 Population and Housing Census.