Social Protection Program Spending and Household Welfare in Ghana

Abstract

Ghana administers multiple social protection programs. One, pensions provided by the Social Security and National Insurance Trust, has a long history, but the rest of the programs have been introduced and expanded over the past two decades. This study assesses the performance of the government of Ghana’s main social assistance and social insurance programs. It discusses the main design and implementation parameters of the programs and summarizes existing evaluative and operational research. The study also examines patterns and trends in program benefit spending, based on government administrative data, and the coverage rates of the programs, their incidence, and their effectiveness in reducing poverty and inequality, based on recent national household sample survey data. Further, the study examines the relationship between household participation in social assistance programs and exposure to adverse covariate shocks, specifically, possible weather-related shocks, based on high-resolution climate risk maps for the country