Social protection program spending and household welfare in Ghana

International development in focus

Format:

Corporate Author:

World Bank

Author:

Dhushyanth Raju, Stephen D. Younger, Christabel E. Dadzie

Publisher:

World Bank

Ghana administers multiple social protection programs. One of these, pensions provided by the Social Security and National Insurance Trust, has a long history, but others - the Ghana School Feeding Programme, Labour-Intensive Public Works program, Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty program, and National Health Insurance Scheme - have been introduced and expanded only over the past two decades. Social Protection Program Spending and Household Welfare in Ghana assesses the performance of the government of Ghana's main social assistance and social insurance programmes. The study discusses the programs' main design and implementation parameters; summarises existing evaluative and operational research; and examines the patterns and trends in program benefit spending, using government administrative data, and the programs' coverage rates, incidence, and effectiveness for reducing poverty and inequality, using recent national household sample survey data. Furthermore, the study examines the relationship between household participation in social assistance programs and exposure to adverse covariant shocks - specifically, possible weather-related shocks - on the basis of high-resolution climate risk maps for the country