The Relationship between Policy Design and Poverty Reduction: How the Design of Social Protection Programmes Address the Needs of the Poor in Ghana

The implementation of social protection programmes has seen some significant success in poverty reduction among nations. This notwithstanding, there are some challenges in the designing of these programmes that sometimes defeat their intended purposes. For this reason, there is the need for a further consideration on the design of social protection programmes in reaching the poor. This paper assesses how the design of social protection programmes in Ghana takes into consideration the needs of the poor and other intended beneficiaries. The study adopts the concepts of social protection designs by Norton, et al (2001) and the beneficiary-targeting approaches by Rama and Dean (2016) to compare and assess how Ghana’s programmes are designed. This is purely a qualitative study that interviewed 20 respondents with adequate knowledge on the design of the social protection programmes. The study revealed that generally, in Ghana, the design processes of social protection programmes adopt more institutional-consultation approach than beneficiary/community-level consultation. On the part of selecting beneficiaries for social protection however, programmes like LEAP, School Feeding and the Capitation Grants were community based, that allow representatives of communities to select beneficiaries for the programme. The design of social protection programmes should be responsive to the needs of their intended beneficiaries, there is therefore, the need for broader consultations with the targeted beneficiaries. Consultations should, hence, not just be limited at the institutional levels.