Africa-Press – Ghana. The Ghana National Household Registry has implored traditional rulers to fully get involved in the national household registration exercise on-going nationwide to lessen the impact of poverty in the country.
The Registry, a unit under the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, is creating a register for the poor and vulnerable to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of social protection programme delivery across the nation.
It involves the collection of information on the composition and socio-economic characteristics of households across the country. Already, the Registry has completed its data collection exercise for the five regions of the North: Upper West, Upper East, Northern, North-East and Savanna, registering up to 809,368 households (4.3 million people).
When completed, the register will be linked to the database of various social intervention programmes including the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) and the Ghana School Feeding Programme.
Dr Richard Adjetey, the Head of the Registry, indicated that the chiefs had a crucial role to play in facilitating the data collection exercise required for its successful execution.
He made the call at the Central Region House of Chiefs in Cape Coast, where he sensitised and solicited their support for a successful exercise in the region.
He briefed the Paramount Chiefs of the objectives of the GNHR and the importance of streamlining the implementation of pro- poor interventions in Ghana to help build a sense of ownership of the registration exercise among them.
“We need the buy-in of all chiefs to help us in this exercise because we are going to work from the districts and in every community. We need your support because without you, there is no way Ghana Household Registry can collect its household data.”
Dr Adjetey pointed out that the Central Region had been identified with extreme poverty rate of 2.1 percent and contributed about 2.2 percent of extreme poverty in Ghana.
“…And most of the poverty in Central Region is peri-urban and we need to help solve this problem,” he added.
He said the exercise was projected to be completed by end of August and would be undertaken by third party firms under the supervision of the Registry to ensure that all qualified persons were captured.
Dr Adjetey said unlike the other regions, two different approaches would be adopted in the Central Region for the exercise “Where you have the poverty rate below 24.6 percent, we will adopt the mobile registration but where it is above 24.6 percent, we will use the census approach,” he explained.
The President of the House, Odeefuo Amoakwa VII, commended the Registry for the exercise and pledged the commitment of the chiefs to support the project.
“The intention behind this exercise is noble and so you have our support. Obviously, this goes to the core of alleviating the poverty situation in the region,” he said. Touching on development, he said the House was in the process of creating a strategic development plan for every traditional area in the region.
He said questionnaires had already been designed for data collection to gather enough information to feed into the strategic plan of the region, being undertaken by the Regional Coordinating Council (RCC).
“So, we shall collaborate with the RCC to have a regional strategic development plan and as they implement the plans of the region, we will be implementing activities of various traditional areas,” he noted.
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