Social protection strategies and poverty reduction in northern Ghana; a beneficiaries’ perspective of leap in Kumbungu District.

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JUNE, 2016.
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Abstract
This study examined the impact of LEAP as a Social Protection Strategy in reducing Poverty in the Kumbungu District of the Northern Region of Ghana using Ordinary Least Square regression analysis and focusing on the relationship between income and other variables including age, education, health, social networking and LEAP as a dummy variable with 1 for beneficiaries and 0 for non-beneficiaries. Beneficiary households were the treatment group with non-beneficiary households being the controlled group. Simple random sampling was employed in the selection of both groups to obtain primary data. Two stage sampling technique was used to generate the required primary data. First, 6 beneficiary communities were selected from 10 project target beneficiary communities. The OLS regression results showed that LEAP had positive relationship with income levels of beneficiaries through increased productivity and access to improved healthcare as LEAP gives free national health insurance registration to beneficiaries. There is also evidence of income levels improving and poverty declining in the district though the cash transfer amount is small to effect any rapid change. It is recommended that government should devote more of its budgetary support to the program in other that the coverage will be expanded to benefit many more districts in the country. In addition, the Department of Social Welfare should be strengthened to undertake more projects that will benefit LEAP and the extreme poor in society.
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Thesis submitted to The Department of Economics of The College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in partial fulfillment of the requirement for award of Master of Science Degree in Economics.
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