Felix Amakye, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies (ILGS), has urged Parliament to speed up the adoption of the Social Protection Bill in order to provide sufficient legal underpinning for the implementation of social intervention measures.
He stated that for any social initiative to be successful, legal support was required to facilitate effective resource mobilization, distribution, and use.
He further claimed that such legislation will reduce corruption and postpone the receipt of funding for certain actions.
“The implementation of social programmes is fraught with challenges and it is time we got a consolidated social protection law to ensure that they are implemented in a coherent and well-coordinated manner,” he stated.
Accountability
Mr Amakye stated Tuesday, August 23,2022 at the social accountability and economic justice clearing platform conference 2022 in Accra, “Without a Social Protection Bill, accountability is very weak.”
“For a policy implementation that has little legal backing, you can smell the angle of corruption within that framework which will be extremely difficult to manage, but when you have the law it tackles issues about procurement, mobilization and disbursement of resources and also provides the citizens the opportunity to demand real accountability,” he said.
He asserted this when presenting the health, education, and resource equity (HERE) research report conducted between April and May 2022.
Here and Now project
The study looked at citizens’ awareness of various social protection interventions and identified barriers to their implementation.
It also sought to improve people’ abilities to hold governmental and corporate actors accountable and to make economic growth work for the underprivileged.
The study was conducted in the Savannah Region’s Central Gonja District, the Ashanti Region’s Juaben Municipality, and the Greater Accra Region’s Accra Metropolitan.
It was co-funded by the non-profit organizations Penplusbytes and Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA).
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Mr Amakye stated that anytime there was a gap in the mobilization and disbursement of resources for social interventions, it represented a lack of accountability on the side of public authorities and the fulfillment of their obligations.
“For us, we believe strongly that we should get a law in place to be able to push for effective accountability.
“This bill will ensure that social protection policies are implemented in a manner that reduces lapses and corruption to give people the assurance that their taxes and rights to good living are being upheld by these interventions,” he said.
In presenting the findings of the study, he stated that around 96.2 percent of respondents were aware of the NHIS, 87% were aware of the Mental Health Act, and an overwhelming number of respondents (2.1 percent) were unaware of the GALOP program.
Relevance of policies
In terms of the importance of social protection programs, he stated that the majority of respondents felt that social protection policies were still important for the growth and safeguarding of people’s well-being.
He stated that for the School Feeding Programme, around 88% of respondents indicated that it was important, with 31.8% stating that the LEAP was not accomplishing its aims and 45.5 percent not being so sure “we are achieving the goals.”
Mirror report
Giving an overview of the CSOs Social Protection Mirror Report 2022, which was conducted in ten regions to assess citizens’ perspectives on social protection delivery in Ghana in July 2022, Dr Isaac Kwakye, Programme Officer of SEND Ghana, stated that it was discovered that spending on social protection in terms of GDP was less than 1%.
SOURCE: GRAPHICONLINE
