World Bank/Curt Cernemark
cate families in their communities on important postnatal
topics such as exclusive breastfeeding and proper nutrition
for new mothers. Cell phones have arrived in rural Ghana,
so volunteers can report health data to a district coordinator
and get answers to questions that come up in their work far
more easily than in the past. Health supplies are delivered
more quickly, and a doctor or midwife can be contacted
immediately in an emergency.
Support for a country’s own plans to reduce poverty
Ghana’s farmers are the key to ending hunger and extreme poverty in the West African nation.
The leaders of Heifer International and Bread for the
World, Jo Luck and David Beckmann, were named the
2010 World Food Prize laureates. The World Food Prize is
the Nobel Prize of food and agriculture—given to individuals who improve the quality, quantity, or availability of food
in the world.
Their successors in 2011 were former Presidents John
Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of
Brazil. Under their leadership, both countries made striking
progress against hunger and poverty. Ghana cut its poverty
rate in half—the first sub-Saharan African country to do so.
In 1991, 51.7 percent of Ghana’s people lived in poverty.
By 2008, just 25.5 percent did.
President Kufuor explained that two of the key factors
that enabled Ghana to make such progress were development assistance and making agriculture a top priority.
Ghana’s development assistance came partly through a
grant from the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation
(MCC), a Bush administration initiative started an agency
started in 2004 as an initiative of the Bush administration.
The MCC directs American assistance to poor countries
that have democratic governments committed to reducing
poverty. One of the most important things about the MCC
is that countries develop their own plans to reduce poverty
with feedback from different groups in society—members
of Parliament, churches, nonprofits, business leaders, rural
groups, and the like. The idea is that hearing from as many
of those affected by the project as possible will make the
plan stronger and more likely to succeed.
Ghana, like many countries that received MCC grants,
chose to focus its development assistance on agriculture. Ironically, the majority of the country’s
hungry people were farmers. As Kufuor put it, “The best
way to break the back of poverty is through agriculture.”
Ghana significantly increased its investments in agriculture. Kufuor emphasized that a comprehensive approach
was needed. It’s not enough to make better farming tools
available to families—they need a way to get their crops
to market. They also need to be able to borrow money to
grow next season’s crops—for supplies such as seeds, for example—and pay it back once the crops are harvested.
Ghana’s plan was a good one: not only has the country
cut hunger and poverty in half, but its economic output
(“Gross Domestic Product” or GDP) has quadrupled since
2000.
The United States has given Ghana development assistance before. For example, a program that provided schoolchildren with a nutritious lunch every day made a very
direct contribution to today’s successes. Ken Hackett, immediate past president of Catholic Relief Services, which
helped carry out the school lunch program, explained,
“Many of the schoolchildren [who participated] are now in
the government of Ghana. Catholic Relief Services worked
ourselves out of a job.”
“Graduating” from development assistance is actually its
goal. If you look at the list of countries that used to receive
U.S. assistance to provide school lunches and emergency
relief, for example, you see Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Germany, Italy… not countries we now consider poor. Some
“alumni” now fund school lunches in other countries themselves, and all purchase goods from the United States.
40 billion:
the number of hours that
women and girls in Africa
spend fetching water each year.
3
5 percent:
the share
of the world’s income shared by the
poorest 40 percent of the population.