Poverty Reduction to Take Regional Dimension

The 15 member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), ranked among the poorest countries in the world has launched a Regional Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (RPRSP) in Accra on Tuesday 12th January. 

The initiative is designed to provide all the states with strategic guidelines to better prioritize individual regional programs and combine them with national ones to maximize the effects of growth and poverty reduction. It also offers the member states better visibility of all the regional programs to enable the states to take them into account in the preparation of their national strategies. 

Launching the RPRSP on behalf of Vice President John D. Mahama, Ms Hanny Sherry Ayittey, Minister of Environment, Science and Technology, implored all stakeholders to lend their support and co-operation to the program designed to reduce the poverty level in West Africa. 

The minister tasked ECOWAS and the West Africa Economic Monetary Union (WAEMU) which jointly prepared the paper with technical assistance from the World Bank and African Development Bank (ADB) to make climate change an important component of their deliberations. 

She explained that the issue of climate change would likely affect anything that they do in reducing poverty. Poverty reduction is linked to education and gender, she noted, and urged member-countries to effectively operate the relevant ECOWAS protocols and conventions. 

Mr Jean De Dieu Somda, vice-president of the ECOWAS Commission, said that the first major challenge that faces West Africa in this millennium is poverty because it affects more than 50 per cent of the people who live on less than one dollar a day. He said the people need decent housing, food, transportation to make life meaningful.