According to the World Bank, poverty is still concentrated in the northern parts of the country, especially the Upper West Region and the western part of the Northern Region, despite Ghana’s progress in poverty reduction.
According to the Bank, 40 per cent of Ghana’s poor live in the north.
“Inequality has increased and in particular there is an increase in spatial employment – the divide between the southern part and the northern part has increased and poverty is increasingly concentrated in the north”, Vasco Molini, a Senior Economist at the World Bank said, at a dialogue in Accra on Friday October 15.
Molini added that about 40 per cent of Ghana’s population are vulnerable to poverty, with their mean expenditure very close to the poverty line, though Ghana has managed to reduce poverty from about 53 per cent, to 21.4 per cent within 1990 and 2012.
A fact sheet of the World Bank made available to ghanabusinessnews.com, says the poverty rate has fallen below 40 per cent in the Central Region and below 20 per cent in most of the southern half of the country: the Greater Accra Region, Western, Ashanti and Eastern Regions, along with the southern parts of the Volta and Brong Ahafo regions.
In contrast “the poverty rate remains far above 40 per cent in most districts in the North” and “one out of three poor people lives in the northern rural areas, while in 1991 it was only one out of five.”
Interestingly, the World Bank’s map of the most poverty-stricken areas in northern Ghana matches the map of areas in the north lacking roads and other infrastructure.
The findings came as a surprise to one Member of Parliament present at the dialogue, Kwabena Appiah-Pinkrah, MP for the Akrofuom constituency in the Ashanti Region who was left in disbelief and in doubt of the credibility and methodology of the World Bank’s latest findings on poverty in Ghana.
“There is something wrong somewhere,” he said.
Speaking later in the day, the President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Dr Akinwumi Adesina who was in Accra to mark ‘End Poverty Day’ with the World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim, also said that while the poverty rate is only four per cent in the Greater Accra region, it is as high as 80 per cent in the Northern Region.
Some representatives from civil society attributed the worrying situation to the absence of a full trickle down of the huge resources being allocated to the region, to the grassroots and the intended beneficiaries.
Poor agricultural productivity per hectare, concentration of industries in the south and its attendant lack of economic activity and employment, and poor coordination of the activities of the various governmental and non-governmental actors in the region were also identified as challenges contributing to poverty in northern Ghana.
Source: Ghana Business News
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