Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger: Poverty in Ghana

Ghana so far has been dealing with its poverty rate well but could be improved obviously, but according to UNICEF (The United Nations Children's Fund , the Ghana poverty rate fell from 56.5 percent to 24.2 percent between 1992 and 2013, but unfortunately Ghana has a huge gap between rural and urban households, which has almost doubled since the 1990s. The poverty rate in urban areas at 10.6 % is insane compared to 37.9 % in rural areas. This is eradicate extreme poverty and hunger essay where the topic will be considered.

Ghana is considered a low income country and according to many development indicators that are still in the state of a low-income country, yet to reflect Ghana's new status as an MIC, these are countries with a per-capita gross national income in 2012 between $1,036 and $12,615. Ghana's poverty level has fallen to about 24.2 percent from the 51% recorded in 1991. This means around 24.2% of Ghanaians which is about 6.4million cannot afford to spend GHS3.60 ( $0.98 AUD ) on food a day. There are about 7 million people below the poverty line in Ghana in 2005. This means the UN has to figure out how to balance out the the gasp between the upper and lower class sop there isn’t such a divide, they could do this by bringing more companies and businesses to the rural parts of the country with maybe mining the country's natural resources which would slowly bring more people to those oparts and the infrastructure would build up and would bring more businesses which means more jobs and more money to be giving to the general population. The way I feel about this is that the UN is giving attention to Ghana but not enough, because with enough patience and work put into it, Ghana could become a respectably stable country.

The main reason Ghana isn’t plagued by poverty like most of its neighboring countries is because Ghana is actually the first Sub-Saharan country to achieve the Millenium Development Goal 1, which is the project to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. FAO focuses on poverty and hunger reduction through: improving agricultural productivity and incomes and promoting better nutritional practices at all levels and programmes that enhance direct and immediate access to food by the neediest, and Ghana is also now a middle income country, and its economy has also proved resilient because of the high prices of Cocoa and Gold. But Ghana is also proving that it is one of the most developed countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, with its amazing statistics with decreasing poverty in its country with 39.5% of the population being in poverty in 1998, then in 2005 only 28.5% were in poverty, and the extremely poor reducing from 26.8% to 18.2%. And Ghana is also on its way to finish the other Millenium Development Goals for income poverty, hunger, primary school completion, gender equality in schools and access to clean drinking water.

In the Bible it tells us about people in poverty and how they deal with such things and it distinctly says that poverty is looked down upon no matter who you are that even the best of people can find their way into poverty, like Jesus, he was not at all rich, he was poor but he was also the best person you could ever hope to meet, but still he was poor, just like the hundreds of thousands of people in the world at that time, this makes us see poverty in a different way, in that people are people no matter the: income, family, job, gender, race or age that people in in poverty are they are the exact same to the richest of people in that they are people, have dreams and goals they want to achieve in life. A catholic social teaching that heavily relates to poverty is the Preferential option for the poor and how caring for the poor is everyone’s responsibility. Preferential care should be shown to poor and vulnerable people, whose needs and rights are given special attention in God’s eyes.

A way to get rid of poverty in Ghana is to improve the: education, Health system, Infrastructure and agriculture of the country to make it more self sufficient so it doesn’t need to spend money on importing stuff like resources and food, when they could make it themselves, they could start by moving companies to rural, poor parts of the country and slowly building up infrastructure around it which would make it possible for other companies to move there as well generating more infrastructure and more jobs so the general population could make more money, which obviously means more money to the government which they can spend on basic need like education and health care, with education making the population smarter with their decisions and making profitable businesses which would help the local economy, and giving them the opportunity to have better jobs like being doctors, and with the government supporting the health care the people are more likely to be injured less and the amount of deaths would go down exponentially while the life expectancy would skyrocket. The root causes of poverty would slowly diminish if these action were put into place and slowly but surely the population would see a great amount of people starting to get out of poverty and into a stable financial situation.

In conclusion I think that The UN has done well in Ghana and has helped with its situation incredibly, but there is still a lot more work to be done and with patience and some work I think that Ghana can join the rest of the world with its new and improved systems, and Ghana can slowly become an upper income country. Again thank you to the UN for choosing to support Ghana through its crisis involving poverty and bringing attention to millions of peoples living situations and helping them get out of it.