What is the main cause of poverty in Ghana? We ask these questions among the many that haunt us as we struggle to understand areas, we can demand but also effect change in.
The problem of poverty in Ghana is multifaceted and complex, influenced by various interrelated factors such as limited access to quality education, inadequate healthcare, agricultural challenges, income inequality, governance inefficiencies and corruption that directs the nation’s wealth into the pockets of the elite few.
What solutions can we propose to mitigate some of these issues raised above? It’s simple. When citizens actively participate in society through local associations and movements outside the state, there are benefits to both state and society.
The poor, more than any other group, rely on basic public services. For vulnerable families, access to education and healthcare are important routes out of poverty.
The participation of youth in politics matters because services work better for the poor when poor citizens participate in reform of service delivery.
We see a rising populated youth in Ghana filled with hopelessness and a future that looks far from grasp. The youth are indoctrinated to believe in political parties and non-realistic alliances that offer nothing beyond the polls.
While there is vast untapped potential going waste because of lack of industry and skills to employ the youth or that can support the youth to tap into their own potentials that can deliver services that can power the economy, the political elite tend to rely heavily on further burdening the lowest income populates with over taxation.
Youth inclusion and especially the inclusion of excluded groups can reduce political poverty and improve social security, encourage economic growth, and promote political accountability, build the political legitimacy of the state, and offer the eventual ‘exit from aid’.
The youth is the human resource, the working class that can work to power a nation’s economy. When jobs are provided, tax revenues allow states to provide security and public services while prioritising their own (rather than donor) policy concerns.
Tax reforms can encourage interest groups in society to mobilise politically – an important bargaining process between state and citizen-taxpayers who perceive they may have a genuine stake in better government Economic growth allows people to escape cycles of poverty and countries to end dependency on aid.
When we look at some of the most successful examples of rapid economic growth in developing to economically competitive worlds, such as China, Vietnam, Singapore, they have certainly not followed the ‘investment climate’ prescription.
They have relied heavily on their human resources, education, skill, industrialisation, and their political dynamics of growth, including some forms of informal relationships between business and state in these countries helped to succeed in generating and sustaining high levels of growth with a proposal to improve how the international community came to appreciate them provides rich evidence based on country experience, and points to the questions whether aid is any effective in dealing with issues of poverty eradication?
It demonstrates that durable reforms need to be constructed, nationally and locally, in a way that fits each political context with the youth at its pivot to build the capacity to contribute to this effectively. When democracies deliver outcomes that benefit the poor, the results are a people who are responsible for themselves and economic growth.
In combating poverty and inequality, we must argue that poverty reduction requires effective and accountable states, the institutionalization of rights, sustained public engagement, expansion of the bargaining power of the poor and those who represent them, and pacts that are structured around issues of employment, welfare, and growth.
Democracies can deliver outcomes that are beneficial to the poor when: rights are institutionalized, which allows the poor to exercise political choice, build alliances with others and hold leaders to account; groups with strong ties to the poor must develop capacity for independent organization and mobilization.
In Ghana and for that matter Africa, groups, movements for change and development must establish structural links with actors involved in policy making.
Policy makers must bridge gabs and not keep those they must hand over to in the future due to the fear of overthrow.
When excluded groups are empowered and given equal opportunities, security and growth is ensured.
We the Youth are the future leaders. We must rise to the task of demanding we are included in decision-making processes and relied on to build our nation with whatever we have at hand.
Ghana Diaspora Youth Movement (Ghadym)
