District Assemblies Urged To Support LEAP

Mr. Nat-Khing Tackie, the Volta Regional Director of the Social Welfare, has commended the Keta Municipal and the South Tongu District Assemblies for their exceptional support to the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme. LEAP focuses on the extremely poor households with people 65 years and above without support, orphans, vulnerable children with disabilities. Mr. Tackie made the commendation at a three-day training workshop for District LEAP implementation Committees from the 10 beneficiary districts in the Volta Region. He said the Municipal and District Chief Executives of Keta Municipal Assembly and South-Tongu respectively readily released their official vehicles to support teams working on the ground. Other Districts benefitting from the Programme in the region are Ho Municipal, Ketu-South, Jasikan, North-Tongu, Nkwanta- North, Nkwanta South, Krachi-East and Krachi-West. Mr. Tackie said LEAP was a people-centred programme which must be owned by the Assemblies and the communities that are benefitting from it. He said the District Assemblies were the ones to take credit for the success of the programme and must therefore be committed to its success. The workshop was being facilitated by �SEEK TO SAVE Foundation� with funding from the Government, UNICEF and the British Department for International Development (DFID). Ms. Commend Eyram Akpeloo, Executive Director of SEEK To SAVE Foundation, called on the District Assemblies to include more women on the District and community Committees of the Programme. During interactions participants called for a mechanism to monitor and evaluate the programme to assess how it is helping to get vulnerable children of school going age into school and access to primary health care. Some participants said some individual beneficiaries praised LEAP for helping to get their children to school and noticed improvement in their productive activities. It was also observed that the beneficiaries were providing useful information on their colleagues who despite the programme were neither sending their children to school nor taking part in primary health care activities. Challenges identified with the implementation of the programme were lack of means of transport for field work, lack of motivation for members of the District and Community Committees, lack of logistics, equipment, office space and manpower for Department of Social Welfare at the district level.