By Christiana Afua Nyarko
Accra, Oct 19, GNA – Dr, Leticia Adelaide Appiah, the Executive Director of the National Population Council (NPC), has asked the Government to implement policies that encourage positive habits to reduce poverty.
She said combining family planning with poverty alleviation programmes would take people out of poverty.
This is because ineffective population management could entrench poverty.
Commenting on the Ghana Statistical Service’s data on multidimensional poverty released to mark the International Day of Poverty Eradication, Dr Appiah, said there was the need to move away from just publishing data to instituting interventions to deal with the underlying causes.
She said population could entrench poverty, making it endemic even with the presence of social interventions such as the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme.
She, therefore, suggested that implementation of social policies by the government should have family planning component in it.
“…We have the LEAP, which has been implemented for a very long time so we should expect that poverty should be decreasing but, look at the GSS data that we have, 50 per cent endemic in some regions. I am sure many of them are enrolled on LEAP,” she said.
She cited examples of countries in Southeast Asia such as Thailand and Singapore and in Africa, Rwanda and Senegal, that attached family planning to social policies that dealt with poverty and had reaped desired results.
The NPC Executive Director explained that focusing only on the economic aspect of dealing with poverty without paying attention to family planning was like “building in the waterway,” which she explained would not yield the needed results.
She said the country needed to implement policies that worked effectively for the eradication of poverty and not what citizens wanted, adding that for her, families facing multidimensional poverty could not continue to multiply as that perpetuated more poverty.
“When you multiply in procreation in poverty, you get more poverty and that is a death sentence,” she said.
Poverty, she said, was very expensive because it gave birth to all kinds of negative things hence, the need to tackle the underlying causes objectively.
Dr Appiah said when police makers drafted policies for the people, they needed to ensure that those policies and programmes impacted on the lives of the citizens positively rather than just formulating numerous policies that ended up on the shelves.
She explained that poverty deprived people of the necessities needed for survival; therefore, policy makers should not entertain habits that kept the masses in poverty, especially when expenditure exceeded one’s means due to the lack of planning in families.
The Executive Director said the Council would continue its advocacy in leading the masses to adopt family planning to tackle poverty and contribute to nation building.
“We are doing our best to engage everyone, including journalists, so they understand the consequences of ineffective population management with consequences of poverty with its evils of ill health, low education, insecurity and crime,” she said.
Explaining the implications of Ghana’s current population growth rate of 2.15 per cent per year, she lamented how the issue of family planning had not been priortised at the national level.
Dr Appiah urged stakeholders to take the issue of family planning seriously and promote the enormous benefits and not allow a few people to highlight the few disadvantages.
GNA