Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
Social welfare policies are intended to address social inequality arising from social structures that marginalize sections of the population. Ghana has pursued a near universal welfare policy since independence in 1957. However, economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s led to a rethink about such provisions.
The chapter will review Ghana's attempt to re-institute universal welfare provisions that were scraped as part of the implementation of structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and IMF designed to stabilize the nation's economy in 1980s. It will detail education, health and other social policies and critically discuss their relevance within the framework of distributive and recgonitive justice, the challenges of implementing such policies and ways to for improve service delivery.
INTRODUCTION
Both anecdotal and formal reports (Ghana Statistical Service, 1989, 2008) indicate that inequality in Ghana is gender and community based. There is a considerable disparity between man and women and between urban and rural communities. Women are generally poorer than men, due to cultural and historical restrictions on women's participation in education, which have led to their exclusion in the formal employment sector. There are also glaring differences in wealth creation between rural and turban areas, attributable to the centre-periphery model of development, which creates more opportunities in urban areas than in rural areas. It is also obvious that natural resource allocation across different regions of Ghana is unequal, with communities near the coast and in the southern rainforest belt better endowed than those away from the coast and the Savannah north. These inequalities are reflected in the composition of poverty in Ghana and affect families and children differently.
Social welfare policies are intended to address social inequality arising from social structures that marginalize sections of the population. Ghana has pursued a near universal welfare policy since independence in 1957. However, economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s led to a rethink about such provisions. The chapter will review Ghana's attempt to re-institute semi universal welfare provisions that were scraped as part of the implementation of structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and IMF designed to stabilize the nation's economy in 1980s. It will detail education, health and other social policies and discuss their relevance within the framework of distributive and recgonitive...