By 2030, all countries including Ghana are supposed to have achieved the 17 Sustainable Development Goals ranging from eradicating poverty in all forms to quality education, clean water and sanitation to partnerships for the goals and their 169 targets.
Ghana has over the years strove in her efforts to achieve these goals particularly the SDG 1 being eradicating poverty in all forms. For instance, in the last two decades, poverty has been reduced from 52.6% to 21.4%.
Similarly, extreme poverty has also been reduced from 37.6% from 1991 to 9.6% in 2013. That notwithstanding, Ghana’s realization of the 17 SDGs is far-fetched as data from the Ghana Statistical Service have it that about 2.2 million Ghanaians are extremely poor.
And in a National Social Protection Dialogue to discuss how Ghana National Households Registry (GNHR) data could be used to effectively target extreme poor and poor households for social interventions in Ghana, the Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP), Otiko Afisa Djaba emphasized the need to collectively eradication poverty.
She also commended the Ghana National Households Registry for enumerating and completing a register on all extreme poor and vulnerable households in the Upper West Region and has just completed data collection also in the Upper East Region.
In June 2016, 135,000 households were enumerated and registered in the Upper West Region whilst 185,000 households were registered in the Upper East. Meanwhile, some cardinal issues revealed by GNHR data collection were that 64% of households in the Upper West Region are extremely poor, 18.5% are poor and 17.5% are non-poor.
Speaking to Atinka News’ Patrick Ofoe Nudzi, Ag. National Coordinator, Ghana National Household Registry, Dr. Prosper Laari, mentioned that per their data only 23,990 representing 17.4% of the total households.
It seems the fight against open defecation is becoming a hard nut to crack as 90,694 households representing about 66% of the 135,000 households enumerated in the Upper East Region have no toilet facilities, the data revealed.
Ghana |Atinkaonline.com |Patrick Ofoe Nudzi
