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It is difficult for Members of Parliament to track monies released for social intervention programmes because Parliament does not have a budget office, the Deputy Ranking Member of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Employment, Social Welfare and State Enterprise, Mr Robert Sarfo-Mensah, has stated.

Although Standing Orders in the House mandated the Ministry of Finance to present quarterly reports for scrutiny, due to the non-availability of a budget office, this was not done, he stated.

The ranking member, who is also the Member of Parliament for Asunafo North, made this known in an interview with the Daily Graphic at the just-ended 53rd session of the United Nations Commission for Social Development in New York.

Quarterly reports

The MP, who is also a member of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Employment, Social Welfare and State Enterprises, said the committee needed these quarterly reports to know how much had been released for social intervention programmes at any given time.

According to him, it had become more difficult to track such monies also because social intervention programmes in the country were uncoordinated and scattered in various ministries.

“Due to the fragmentation in implementing social protection programmes in the country, it makes it difficult to know in absolute terms what goes into social protection,” he added.

Also, he said, because there was no legislation on social intervention in Ghana, it made it difficult to track sources of funding for such interventions.

The uncoordinated nature of these social intervention programmes, he said, made their budget vulnerable to budget cuts when the need became pressing on the Minister of Finance to cut the national budget.

Mr Sarfo-Mensah, who cited a budget cut in the LEAP programme for 2014, said that would not have been so if social intervention programmes were coordinated from one source.

He said although at the global level under the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) agreements, countries were mandated to source 20 per cent of their budget allocation to social intervention, this could however not be measured in Ghana, as the programme was implemented without a formula.

Becoming self-sufficient

The MP also called for a mechanism to be put in place where people on a particular social intervention programme could be graduated onto another where they could learn skills training or be given a start-up capital so as to wean them off cash transfer to skills development.

If that was not done, he said, the government would continue to pay huge amounts for social intervention without helping people to develop themselves and move from being vulnerable to being self-reliant.

One other critical point in the issue of social intervention, he said, was sustainability.

According to him, since many of the social intervention programmes were carried out through donor funding, there was the need for the government to come out with plans ahead of time to take over their implementation when donor funding elapsed so as to not leave beneficiaries midstream.

However, he said, because there were no clear policies now, the projects were left unended when the donor funding ran out, citing the Gender Responsive Skills and Community Development Project (GRSCDP), which was being implemented by the Department of Women under the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection and funded by the African Development Bank (AfDB).

Aging in Ghana

Another area of concern to Mr Sarfo-Mensah was the issue of an aging policy for the country.

According to him, there was no proper administrative structure on aging although the country had an aged population of about three million (according to the 2010 Population and Housing Census).

He called on the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection to come out with a department of the aged so as to foresee the activities of the aged in our population.