A report that addresses West Africa’s inequality crisis has recommended that governments in the sub-region must pursue policies designed to support growth, eradicate poverty and reduce inequality.
The report also urged the governments and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to develop national and regional plans to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, with clear time-bound targets.
The 48-page report is an initiative of SEND Ghana, a non-governmental organisation, in partnership with the Sustainable Development Goal 10 civil society organisations platform.
It was funded by Oxfam, an international charity organisation whose work is to reduce global poverty.
The report is part of a project being implemented to advocate inclusive development in response to increasing inequality in Ghana, and based on the findings and recommendations of the 2019 Oxfam’s Commitment to Reducing Inequality (CRI).
Briefing
Briefing the Daily Graphic on the findings and recommendations of the report in Bolgatanga, the Programme Officer, Strategic Projects of SEND Ghana, Mrs Rachel Gyabaah, further explained that conscious efforts must be made to ensure that governments implemented plans that would regularly help to update data on national income and consumption data and make them publicly available so that inequality levels could be monitored effectively.
The report also suggested the need for governments to “spend sufficiently on universal quality public services that reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, as well as reduce gender disparity”.
The CRI Index, she observed, also demonstrated that very few governments in the region were currently making the right choices to close the inequality gap.
Mrs Gyabaah said the report listed about 31-point recommendations, including allocating a minimum of 20 per cent of government budgets to boost universal public quality education that was free of charge, with special emphasis on improving access to high-quality primary and secondary education.
The report also recommended the allocation of a minimum of 15 per cent of government budgets to fund a public health sector that was free of charge, universal, easily accessible and of high quality.
It also advocated the implementation of universal social protection programmes that were adequately funded and that benefitted mainly the poorest people, while warning against the “use of divisive poverty targeting or failed health insurance schemes”.
The report recommended the need to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor through progressive taxation and expanding the taxes that were typically paid by the rich.
It also recommended the need to significantly improve protection for the right of labour to unionise and to strike and for unions to bargain on behalf of their members.
The report equally stressed the need for governments to put in measures to “stop the large-scale land grabbing that is currently happening at the expense of small-scale farmers”.
It, therefore, suggested the need to streamline land registration processes to ease the burden and the prohibitive cost of land registration, especially for vulnerable groups, including women and young people.
Economies
The report stated that in 2018, six of the 10 fastest-growing economies in Africa — Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Benin and Guinea — were in West Africa, while Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Senegal were among the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world.
Ithowever, expressed regret that in most countries, the benefits of this unprecedented economic growth went to a few people.
The report also observed that in Ghana, “one of the richest men earned more in a month than one of the poorest women could earn in 1,000 years.
In the decade ending in 2016, the country saw 1,000 new US dollar millionaires created, but only 60 of these were women.
While a few people grew super-rich, nearly one million more, mostly from the Savannah Region of the country, were pushed into the poverty pool, while thousands of those who were already poor sank even deeper.
It added that the wealthiest 10 per cent of Ghanaians now accounted for 32 per cent of the country’s total consumption, which was more than the consumption of the bottom 60 per cent of the population combined, while the very poorest 10 per cent of Ghanaians consumed only two per cent.
