Beneficiaries of the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) in Kumasi numbering 53, whose grants were accumulated for four months have finally received the outstanding amount.
These are beneficiaries drawn from Daaban, Sokoban, and Dakwadwom, all in the Greater Kumasi Metropolis in the Ashanti Region.
The Minister of Sanitation and Water Resources, Cecilia Abena Dapaah, who is the caretaker minister of the Ministry of Gender Children and Social Protection, last Monday, visited those communities as part of her monitoring role, and ensured that the accumulated stipends were given to the beneficiaries.
She was accompanied by the Chief Director of the Ministry, Dr Afisah Zackariah and some focal persons from the Department of Social Welfare in Kumasi.
Use judiciously
In her separate interactions with members of the various communities, Mrs Dapaah advised them to use their money judiciously, stating that those monies were not meant for merrymaking.
“You can invest your accumulated grants in economic activities to help improve your livelihoods,” she urged the beneficiaries, stating that the government was happy that the programme had brought some form of relief to the people.
She said the government was committed to sustaining the LEAP programme as a key social intervention measure.
Sharing her excitement after receiving her grant, a beneficiary, 85-year-old Maame Esibri, said she was grateful to the ministry for paying all their grants, saying that it had come at a time that life was difficult for her and her dependents.
She told the minister that she would invest some of the grant in her charcoal business and make some profit so that in case their grant was delayed again, she could rely on the small gains she made from the sale of the charcoal.
LEAP
Ghana’s flagship social protection programme, LEAP, provides bi-monthly cash payments to extremely poor households in all districts of the country.
In addition to the cash transfer, LEAP offers free registration in the National Health Insurance Scheme.
In order to participate in LEAP, poor households also need to have at least one member who is elderly, living with a disability or an orphaned and vulnerable child.
LEAP 1000 introduced an additional group for inclusion, targeting households with pregnant women and mothers with infants, to support the window of the first 1,000 days of life in order to alleviate household poverty and improve the nutritional status of infants.
Ashantibiz
