GHANA NATIONAL HOUSEHOLD REGISTRY EXERCISE IN HO MUNICIPAL

The GNHR aims to identify the poor and vulnerable, and most social protection programmes use a targeting method. Effective targeting of the poor and vulnerable is, therefore, a prerequisite for an efficient social protection system. It ensures that a larger share of benefits of social programmes go to the poorest and the most vulnerable in society.

The numerous social protection programmes currently being implemented in Ghana employ variety of methods to target the poor and vulnerable. These methods include poverty/ geographical ranking, Proxy Means Testing (PMT), categorical and community based targeting. In an attempt to streamline the targeting system in the country, the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP) received funding from the World Bank to establish the Ghana National Household Registry (GNHR) to provide a common targeting mechanism that can assist social protection programmes identify, prioritize, and select households living in vulnerable conditions to ensure that different social programmes effectively reach them.

The GNHR involves registering of households and collecting basic information on their socioeconomic status by administering a data intake questionnaire to each household. Since its establishment in August 2016, the GNHR project unit has put in place systems and delivery mechanisms that ensured the successful implementation of the project in the Upper West,Upper East, Northern, savannah and North East Regions of Ghana..

The registry has also successfully established the necessary institutional systems and policy regimes that can be leveraged on to scale up the project across the country.Data collection activities are currently ongoing in the Central, Volta and Oti Regions.