ADOPT SOCIAL PROTECTION CONCEPT — DR AHADZIE (Page 36)

Story: Tim Dzamboe, Ho

A fellow of the Centre for Social Policy Studies at the University of Ghana, Dr William Ahadzie, has stated that social protection is now an emerging concept in the contemporary world, and which has been adopted by nations in the interest of social justice.
He said where there was no social protection, society was considered a failure because it portrayed such societies as ignoring the weak, who could not manage several risks in their lives.
Dr Ahadzie was delivering a paper on “the concept and practice of social protection” at a National Social Protection and Strategy (NSPS) sensitisation workshop organised by the Ministry of Manpower, Youth and Employment at Ho.
He recounted the historical development of social protection in 1598 to 1948 in Britain, spanning to the United States of America (USA) in 1935 to 1960.
According to him, it was hinged on laws to protect the poor in society and the evolution of insurance practices championed by the state.
Dr Ahadzie said the development of social protection in Ghana underscored investing in people, and that it sought to take private and public partnership to forge the policy ahead with the support of international development agencies, research and advocacy of non-governmental organisations.
He mentioned some of them as the Department for International Development (DFID), the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
Dr Ahadzie said the exemption policy on health delivery, free ride for school children, social mitigation fund, the Capitation Grant and the School Feeding Programme, were some of the social protection programmes in the country.
He said the government’s commitment was reflected in increasing budgetary allocation, legislation, position papers on the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS), the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), among others.
Dr Ahadzie, however, stated that the challenges facing social protection were funding and sustainability, minimising of leakage and scaling it up, adding that social protection was now regarded as a rights-based approach than a service provision concept.
In another paper delivered by Mrs Angela Asante-Asare, she reiterated that the national social protection strategy emphasised investing in people.
She said that was the essence of formulating the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) as a component of the strategy.
According to her, the NSPS had been identified as an empowerment strategy for the vulnerable and excluded social groups under the GPRS I and II, and that it would cater for socio-economic risks, such as unemployment, sickness, disability and old age.
Mrs Asante-Asare stated that major social development programmes would cover social grants support for livelihood empowerment, child protection, survival and development intervention, labour market policies and programmes, health programmes, social insurance and micro finance, and social welfare programmes.
In a welcoming address, the Volta Regional Director of the Department of Social Welfare, Mr Barnabas Adjin, said the vulnerable in society should be given the opportunity to develop themselves and that the workshop was an opportunity to see to the development of all people.
He urged the participants to relentlessly support the department to foster a strong collaboration to facilitate the full implementation of the programme.
Mr Adjin said in the absence of inadequate resources, there was the need to pool their resources to achieve the same objective.