Director-General of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Dr. Esseim Mensah-Abrampa, claims that during the past 20 years, poverty in Ghana has been cut in half.
In an interview with TV3, based in Accra, he emphasized once more that Ghana, with its lower middle-class economy, was not impoverished.
He told Kemmini Amanor, host of Hot Issues programme: “Ghana is not poor, we are a lower-middle-income country. We are not poor because if you have the means of measuring in terms of development with all the global indicators, we have what we call the least developed countries, you have developing countries then you have lower-middle-income, upper-middle-income, and then developed.
“So it tells you that if you are going by these five graduations, we are right in the middle.”
He explained why the lower middle-income status did not reflect in the lives of most Ghanaians, stating thus: “It does reflect in the lives of the people because per capita income, how much you earn, and the sophistication in our lives and our well-being are far higher than the average in the world.”
He added “Definitely, we cannot live on the same income bracket which means that definitely there are some people who are poor but there is a process which has gone on for a very long time within twenty years.
“We have been able to half that, it means we have been able to move half of the people who are poor right into a higher range of wellbeing and satisfaction. So it is a process,” he stressed.
According to the World Bank, economies classified as lower-middle-income have a per capita Gross National Income (GNI) of $1,036 to $4,045, while those classified as upper-middle-income have a per capita GNI of $4,046 to $12,535 (2021).
Sixty-two percent of the world’s poor live in middle-income countries, which make up 75% of the global population.
Over the past 20 years, Ghana’s poverty rate has dropped by half, according to the NDPC Boss.