The Ghanaian Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty Program
The Livelihood Empowerment against Poverty (LEAP) Program is a social cash transfer program which provides cash and health insurance to extremely poor households across Ghana to alleviate short-term poverty and encourage long term human capital development. LEAP started a trial phase in March 2008 and then began expanding gradually in 2009 and 2010, and currently (June 2010)reaches approximately 35,000 households across Ghana with an annual expenditure of approximately USD11m. The program is fully funded from general revenues of the Government of Ghana, and is the flagship program of its National Social Protection Strategy. It is implemented by the Department of Social Welfare (DSW) in the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare (MESW). Eligibility is based on poverty and having a household member in at least one of three demographic categories; single parent with orphan or vulnerable child (OVC), elderly poor, or person with extreme disability unable to work (PWD). Initial selection of households is done through a community based process and is verified centrally with a proxy means test. An exciting feature of LEAP, unique in the world, is that aside from direct cash payments, beneficiaries are provided free health insurance through the new National Health Insurance Scheme which began in 2004-05. This is facilitated through an MOU between the MESW and Ministry of Health; funds to cover enrollment in health insurance are transferred directly to the local health authority who then issues cards to LEAP households. Continued receipt of cash payments from LEAP is conditional on a health insurance card.
Evaluation of the Ghana LEAP Program
The impact evaluation is being implemented by a consortium of partners including the Institute for Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) of the University of Ghana-Legon and the University of North Carolina under contract to the Government of Ghana. The evaluation strategy entails a longitudinal propensity score matching (PSM) design.
Baseline data was collected from future beneficiaries who were included in a larger nationally representative sample of households surveyed as part of a research study conducted by ISSER and Yale University (USA) in the first quarter of 2010. A comparison group of ‘matched’ households has been selected from the ISSER sample and were re-interviewed in the first quarter of 2012 along with LEAP beneficiaries to measure changes in outcomes across treatment and comparison group. During implementation of the follow-up survey, 215 additional households were re-interviewed from the ISSER sample to generate additional statistical power for the study. These additional households were households that had similar propensity scores to the LEAP households and that were residing in the same communities that were already being visited by the ISSER enumeration team, and so could be interviewed at low additional cost.
There were 1398 target households (699 in each of the LEAP and matched ISSER samples) to be followed during the 2012 survey. A total of 1298 of these households were actually re-interviewed for a success rate of 92 percent. With the additional 215 households from the ISSER sample, the final analysis sample consists of 1613 households and a final longitudinal sample of 1504 households (858 ISSER, 646 LEAP).
The baseline and the 24-month follow-up survey of the special evaluation sample are funded by DSW through an Institutional Strengthening Program with DFID. Funding from 3IE has been acquired to finance the follow-up survey of the comparison group from the ISSER sample in order to carry out a robust impact evaluation analysis. The PSM strategy will enable the evaluation team to attribute changes over time to the intervention by allowing for the construction of a counterfactual through the matched comparison group, and to follow this group over the same period of observation.
The survey ISSER/Yale survey instrument (household and community) can be downloaded here. The household file is very large and so is broken into three parts.
The baseline evaluation report, which presents the propensity score matching results, was presented to Government and other Development partners in Akosombo, Ghana in October 2011 and will be available to the public once it has been approved for release by Government.
The baseline household survey instrument can be downloaded here. The instrument is separated into three parts because of its size.
- LEAP baseline household questionaire, part 1
- LEAP baseline household questionaire, part 2
- LEAP baseline household questionnaire, part 3
The 24-month follow-up survey can be downloaded here.
