Programme this year, the Deputy Director of the LEAP Programme, Mr Lawrence Ofori Addo, has said.
Approximately 64,000 households are currently benefiting from the programme.
Averagely, a household comprises four persons and the additional 11,000 will bring the total beneficiaries to 75,000.
In an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra last Wednesday, Mr Addo said currently, officials were using a community based targeting method and a proxy means testing system to identify the extremely poor households in the communities.
That, he said, was done by going to the communities to ask people who they thought were extremely poor, for the people in the various communities to give their dimension.
“We do this but cannot rely on that to identify the poor households since some people might mention only their relatives for them to be aided”, he added.
The LEAP is a programme that provides money and free health insurance to extremely poor households across the country to help improve short-term poverty and encourage long-term human capital development.
It is a flagship programme of the National Social Protection Strategy and implemented by the Department of Social Welfare (DSW) in the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare (MESW).
The LEAP started on a pilot phase in March 2008 with about 2000 households, and expanded gradually in 2009 and 2010. In June 2010, approximately 35,000 households were enrolled with an annual expenditure of about USD 11 million.
Mr Addo, therefore, proclaimed that the proxy means test, which used a number of questions programmed on a database, was used to select and verify the extremely poor households, as well as categorise them into groups.
Taking the Daily Graphic through the database selection process on which various extremely poor households were selected and categorised, Mr Addo explained that poverty was widespread in Ghana, so to be able to identify the extremely poor, the two methods; community base and proxy means test were used.
He further stated that it was likely to increase the grant given to the households to about GH¢36 a month per household.
He stated that the programme looked at households which had at least one of its members who was a single parent with orphan or vulnerable child (OVC), elderly poor or a person with extreme disability and unable to work.
He held that those people suffered a lot of prejudices and abuses from the society, thus the need to help alleviate the poverty and suffering.
According to Mr Addo, there had been an agreement with the Ministries of Local Government, Education, Food and Agriculture, Women and Children’s affairs and the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare to use a common mechanism of targetting the poor in the communities.
He also stated that they were rolling out that strategy with the Ministry of Health as well, to identify and help individuals in the very poor households.
Delays in the releases of funds from the central government to households selected is a major challenge that has affected the implementation of the LEAP Programme.
Mr Addo affirmed to the Daily Graphic that the programme had arrears of eight months to pay to the beneficiaries of the programme, adding that funds had been released for the payment of the arrears to be made in about a week or two.
Other great challenges that had affected the facilitation and implementation of the programme was human resource constraints, which were due to the government’s policy on employment that no person be employed except when there was vacancy in an office and the giving of wrong information by the people in the communities, which made the work difficult for the LEAP officers.
According to Mr Addo, the less number of officers at the LEAP Programme office affected the work at the office since the same officers who mobilised the people for the programme were the same people to collect data in the communities.
The administration of the LEAP Programme, therefore, called on the government to help resolve these problems and assured Ghanaians that they would streamline things this year to develop a more systematic way of enrolling the beneficiaries, to allow a lot more of beneficiaries to benefit from the programme to help reduce poverty and encourage human capital development in the country.
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