Insights

Designing a Cash Transfer to ‘LEAP’ out of Poverty

Efua Akyere Graham

Social Cash Transfers have grown in popularity over the years in Africa, with the rationale that they are well-suited to address the continent’s specific social protection needs. Ghana’s LEAP programme, one of Africa’s early social cash transfers, is one that offers cash and access to services to reduce poverty. It is also a model that is being learnt from and increasingly implemented given assertions that it addresses the limitations of income-only SCT interventions. How has LEAP been designed to achieve its targets?

Following Latin American and Asian successes in the 1990s and reports indicating that Social Cash Transfers (SCTs) provide regular income to poor households that reduce impacts of disasters and economic shocks (OECD, 2009; Leisering, 2018), the African continent has seen a wave of discussions regarding the feasibility of SCTs to meet the continent’s specific social protection needs. The urgency of poverty elimination has led to piqued interests in testing out SCTs with over 320 programmes implemented on the continent (Cummins, 2012)...