Ghana has spent billions scaling up its two flagship social protection programs. Between 2019 and 2024, Ghana’s government increased its budget for the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty program (LEAP), the country's main cash transfer scheme for the extreme poor - by more than 300 percent. The money set aside for it grew from GHS168 million to GHS720 million. However, the number of households actually receiving payments stayed almost exactly the same.
For five consecutive years, LEAP's beneficiary count sat between 330,000 and 350,551 households.
Not because Ghana had run out of poor families - the country’s own surveys consistently estimate four to five million families living below the poverty line - but because the system responsible for finding them, verifying their circumstances, and connecting them to a payment point simply could not keep pace with the money being set aside in their name.
That gap between what a budget promises and what a program actually delivers is the real story running through a decade of Ghana’s social protection data.
Taken together, LEAP and the Ghana School Feeding Program (GSFP) which provides one hot meal a day to children in public primary schools - now represent a combined annual commitment of GHS3.08 billion, roughly the equivalent of building a mid - sized teaching hospital every few months. But the numbers behind the headline figures tell a more complicated story.
THE INFLATION ILLUSION
Start with what the growth actually means once you adjust for rising prices. Between 2015 and 2026, Ghana’s general price level - what everyday goods and services cost, increased by more than 500 percent.
The 2022 economic crisis was particularly damaging, with inflation hitting 54.1 percent in a single year. Against that backdrop, much of the budget expansion for both program was not an upgrade. It was the cost of standing still.
Consider what happened to LEAP's minimum cash grant; the bi-monthly payment sent to the smallest eligible household. In 2015 it was GHS48. By 2026 it reaches GHS320. On paper that looks like a 567 percent increase. But once you strip out inflation, the real purchasing power gain over eleven years is closer to 30 percent.
More tellingly, from 2016 through to 2022 the minimum grant did not move, frozen at GHS64 while the cost of rice, cooking oil, and transport climbed steadily in markets across the country. The increment eventually were not policy ambitions. They were corrections that arrived years late.
In 2024, the government introduced an indexation mechanism for LEAP - essentially a built-in adjustment that ties grant values to price levels, so that the real worth of a payment cannot be quietly eroded between election cycles.
It is the kind of safeguard most comparable program in East Africa have had for years. That it took Ghana until 2024 to realize how these programs have historically been managed: with close attention to the headline budget figure and less attention to what that budget can actually buy.
THE WALL NOBODY TALKS ABOUT
Return to that five-year coverage plateau. The budgets kept rising. The beneficiary count did not. The explanation lies less in political will than in administrative capacity - the unglamorous infrastructure of district social welfare offices, household registries, and payment networks that determine whether a program actually works on the ground.
District social welfare offices are the front line of LEAP delivery. They identify eligible households, process applications, manage local pay-points, and handle grievances. These offices were not significantly expanded as the program's ambitions grew.
The Ghana National Household Registry - the master database used to determine who qualifies for support - has required continuous updating that has frequently fallen behind the roll out schedule.
The result is a program with the funding to reach far more people than it currently does, held back by the human and institutional capacity required to reach them.
The 2026 target of 400,000 households - an addition of approximately 50,000 new families in a single year - is the most aggressive expansion since the program’s early growth phase.
It is achievable in budget terms. Whether the ground-level machinery can absorb it in practice is the question that budget documents, by their nature, do not answer.
FOUR MILLION CHILDREN AND A MEAL THAT COSTS LESS THAN A SACHET OF WATER
The Ghana School Feeding Program is the larger and more visible of the two initiatives. It now serves more than four million pupils across 11,000 public basic schools, employing roughly 34,350 caterers - the great majority of them women running small cooking operations out of school kitchens. In terms of raw coverage, it is close to a universal service for public primary education in Ghana.
The per-pupil daily food subsidy - the amount the government pays toward each child’s meal started at GHS0.63 (63pesewas) in 2015, has reached GHS1.98 in 2026.
To put that in context: a basic plate of rice and stew at a roadside food stall in most Ghanaian towns costs several times that amount. The adequacy of the grant has been a running argument between program administrators, caterers, and nutrition researchers for years.
Caterers in several regions have reported going multiple school terms without being paid for meals already served, effectively using their own savings to finance a government program while waiting for reimbursement.
The COVID-19 period exposed the fragile foundations of the program. In 2021, with schools intermittently closed and unpaid caterer bills mounting, the government moved the school feeding budget out of its home ministry entirely and routed it through a separate government fund - the District Assemblies Common Fund; creating reporting confusion that took the better part of two years to resolve.
Kenya faced a comparable crisis with its own school feeding program during the same period and responded by locking in supply agreements with local smallholder farmers.
Ghana’s 2026 local procurement mandate, which requires schools to source staples like rice, maize, chicken and eggs domestically, is a similar move - arrived late, but pointed in the right direction.
APPROVED BUDGETS AND ACTUAL PAYMENTS ARE NOT THE SAME
Across both programs, one pattern repeats consistently enough to call it structural. What parliament approves at the start of a financial year and what the government treasury actually releases to the programs during that year are regularly different - and the gap is rarely small.
LEAP's release rate has ranged from around 62 percent of the approved budget in difficult fiscal years to a full 100 percent release in 2024, which was notable enough that officials specifically appreciated.
The school feeding program saw GHS951.7 million approved in 2022 but only GHS434.5 million released by October of that year - less than half.
These shortfalls are not rounding errors in a spreadsheet. They represent payment cycles that simply do not happen - months where the grandmother expecting her bi-monthly transfer receives nothing, or a school term where caterers serve meals on credit they may not recover for a year.
Ghana’s treasury faces genuine pressures that affect all government spending, but the consequences of delayed releases fall hardest and most directly on the people at the end of these particular payment chains.
THE 99TH CYCLE
In 2025, LEAP reached its 99th payment cycle. That is a number worth pausing. Every two months, year after year, for nearly two decades, the Ghanaian state has attempted to receive cash directly into the hands of its poorest households.
he machinery for doing it - the beneficiary lists, the mobile money networks, the district pay-points, exists because someone built it, imperfectly and slowly, over a long time.
What the data cannot tell us is whether the woman who received a payment in cycle one is still on the list in cycle 99 - and whether what arrives in her mobile money account today buys her anything close to what it bought her 2 years ago. The indexation fix introduced in 2024 suggests the government is finally asking that question.
The push to add 50,000 more households in 2026 demands more budget allocation and disbursement.
Both are overdue. Neither is it sufficient on its own. These programs are bigger than they have ever been. Whether they are actually working better - reaching more people, on time, with enough money to matter - is still, after a decade and several billion cedis, an open question.
Data sourced from Ministry of Finance Budget Statements and MoGCSP Program Based Budget Estimates (2015–2026).
Rexford Owusu
Public Policy Intern
Institute for Liberty and Policy Innovation (ILAPI
Tema
Image source: https://leap.mogcsp.gov.gh/press-release-43rd-payment-cycle-of-leap-social-cash-grant/
