The World Bank’s Partnership for Economic Inclusion organized a Social Protection South-South Learning Forum in Rwanda from February 10–14, 2025. This year’s event, which is the eighth iteration of the forum and was hosted in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, was under the theme “Economic Inclusion: Scaling up Pathways to Better Jobs for the Poor,”
The forum brought together more than 270 participants, drawn from nearly 60 countries comprising policymakers, government practitioners and partners from around the world. The event provided opportunity for peer-to-peer learning, focusing on scaling evidence-based economic inclusion through government programmes, drawing from the State of Economic Inclusion Report, which was launched in the last quarter of 2025.
As a country implementing a flagship economic inclusion program under the Ghana Productive Safety Net Project that has to date enrolled over 60,000 beneficiaries, Ghana was invited to participate in the 5-day event and share its experiences with participants and also learn lessons from other global practitioners and partners that could be applied in improving implementation towards the achievement of project outcomes.
The delegation that represented the country at the programme comprised the following:
- Eric Tetteh Addison – Director PPBMED (MLGCRA)
- Prosper B. Laari – National Co-ordinator GPSNP2 (MLGCRA)
- Desmond Duametu – Productive Inclusion Specialist GPSNP2 (MLGCRA)
- Adwoa Asotia-Boakye – National Engineer GPSNP2 (MLGCRA)
Prof. Prosper Laari underscored the significant impact of the Ghana Productive Safety Net Project on the social protection delivery space. Aside provision of public assets like roads, dams and climate change mitigation interventions, the project through the Labour-Intensive Public Works (LIPW) component has supported over 75,000 poor and extreme poor beneficiaries in 121 districts with short term employment in providing needed community assets. In return for their services, these beneficiaries have earned wages that have enabled them to smoothen their household consumption. Community assets provided through the project include access roads that connect deprived communities to agricultural produce, markets and other social services. The dams constructed under the project continue to support livestock watering, crop irrigation and other domestic uses. The project has also contributed to the green environment through its afforestation and massive plantation development drive that also have commercial value for the beneficiary communities and districts. On the Productive Inclusion component, many poor households now have one enterprise activity or the other and this has aided them to support their families. Beneficiaries in the north and the southern parts of the country have undertaken different types of income generating activities with very useful testimonies or success stories. The project has so far supported over 26,000 beneficiaries with grants of a ceiling of US$300 to embark upon their various income generating activities.
Mr. Desmond Duametu the Productive Inclusion Specialist in a panel discussion at the event on the theme Designing for Impact: Programmatic Adaptations to Scale, took the opportunity to showcase the experiences and good works that have been done in Ghana in growing the Ghanaian version of Productive/Economic Inclusion programming (now known as CLASS under GPSNP2) from an initial pilot that covered only 7,072 beneficiaries across 8 MMDAs in the Upper East Region (then mostly from rural communities) in 2015/2016 to a programme that has assumed national scale covering over 60,000 beneficiaries from over 1,140 communities across 108 MMDAs – with an urban model commencing in the last quarter of 2024.
The National Engineer, Mrs. Adwoa Asoatia-Boakye, also in one of the roundtable discussions, during the programme, provided the background to public works implementation in Ghana and highlighted the country’s strides on the digitisation of the Labour-Intensive Public Works (LIPW) implementation and how it has transitioned from using manual processes to digital over the past ten years.
The Director PPBME, Mr. Eric Tetteh-Addison, on his part, also highlighted the decentralized nature of the programme allowing implementation at the district and local levels, thus promoting ownership and sustainability of the programmes.
Finally, Prof. Prosper Laari was excited about the peer-to-peer learning experience and hoped that the new partnerships and networks established through the delegation’s participation in the forum will be harnessed in improving, consolidating and expand programme delivery and coverage in the country. He hinted of a West-West learning forum for implementing countries in West Africa relying on the expertise and lessons in Ghana to manage their safety net programmess. Economic Inclusion is worth investing in as a major pathway for ensuring sustainable poverty reduction and there is the need to prioritize investment in expanding its implementation as it has the potential of creating sustainable jobs for the poor and vulnerable, especially for the youth and women.