The Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Hon. Cynthia Mamle Morrison has stated that the NPP has expanded the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) program by 73% since they came into power.
Speaking on PM express on Wednesday night, the Hon. Minister said statistics covering the period that the NPP took over till now shows that Ghana has attained Grade A on LEAP on the DFID.
“We have done expansion of 73% from where NDC left off. But LEAP is not for everybody, that is what we have to know. LEAP is for the poorest of the Poor. And so when you look at the numbers, you will think there are a lot of Ghanaians, but it is not everybody that is poor.”
On the exact number of more people the government has added to the LEAP program since they took office, they Hon. Morrison said “… 334,000 households in 260 districts. That is the current number. It was 213,000 then. But what happened with LEAP is that you can’t just go and expand it like school feeding, you have to assess the household, we are giving it to the poorest of the poor.”
She further explained that her outfit has conducted the third wave of the LEAP impact evaluation online and has also made provisions to add women branded as witches in the witch camps in the Northern part of the country.
“We have also captured them, 600,000 and then 200,000 children, we have put them on LEAP now. For next week, we have their budget here; we are going to disburse their monies to them. And so, for now, we did not capture LEAP on our tracker because we are on course and we are doing it”
The 2020 Manifesto of the NPP was silence on the LEAP program, however Hon. Morrison said;
“LEAP is doing very well and if it is not on the manifesto, the people on the ground know that we are doing very well”.
The former Minister for Gender, Children and Social protection, Nana Oye Bampoe Addo on the other hand, stated that the NDC, looking at how messy the NPP provided food for the vulnerable during the three-week lockdown, has decided to roll out a special emergency response LEAP program to address any unforeseen occurrences in the near future.
“We saw what happened when we have COVID. And we had a three-week lockdown and the vulnerable persons were helpless and the government sought to support them by feeding them with already cooked food. We saw how it was messy, disorganized, it was not targeted and so at the end of the day, the vulnerable persons in the COVID affected communities who were supposed to have received that support from government were not able to receive that support”.
She added that the NDC had a plan and were better organized to manage disasters during their tenure of office.
“When we were in government under President John Mahama, we had humanitarian crises and disasters, the dam up North broke, and we also had the June 3rd disaster at the Kwame Nkrumah cycle and its environs. We were able to address these problems and humanitarian crises because the NDC had a plan.
“We were able to effectively target the vulnerable people who were adversely affected, we supported them, gave them emergency LEAP which is also part of LEAP.
“Now because of COVID, there is a lesson learnt. In fact, when you look throughout our ‘People’s Manifesto’, you find out that COVID is integrated throughout from A to Z. So, we are going to now have Special Emergency LEAP Program so that in case we have a humanitarian crisis; in case we have an emergency disaster, be it a human disaster, the government has a plan in place and the government will fuse into action”.
She further stated that the NDC has also put in place a program that targets people in the coastal areas where poverty rates are high.
“So that we don’t have what occurred, the disorganized approach that occurred during the COVID lockdown. We also have a Coastal LEAP Life Program because of the poverty rates. Now that Central Region is one of the top five region in terms of poverty.”
