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The residents of Damwaateon and Mwaakpa in the Wa West District, have appealed to the government to extend the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme to benefit people in the communities.

They said there were vulnerable people in the community who could be enrolled unto the programme to help alleviate their plight and improve their livelihoods.

Mr Yiso Soonye, a member of the Damwaateon community made the appeal in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at the community on Monday.

“We have heard that government has been helping the vulnerable people by giving them money, but we have not seen anything like that here, nobody in this community is benefiting from that, but we have so many vulnerable people here,” he said.

He noted that in some places, even strong people were receiving those monies and could not fathom why the government had neglected their community in the LEAP programme.

Mr Soonye, therefore, appealed to the Wa West District Chief Executive, Mr Edward Laabiri Sabo and other stakeholders in charge of the LEAP programme to come to their aid by ensuring that the vulnerable and disadvantaged people at Damwaateon community also benefited from that laudable initiative.

Madam Soyeon Diriye, a member of the Mwaakpa community, said the LEAP programme would have been of great relief to them as they would channel those monies into productive ventures such as shea butter processing and farming.
Meanwhile, Mr Yussif Gizuure, the Assembly Member for the area, encouraged the people to persistently demand such social interventions from duty bearers, especially whenever they came to their communities to campaign.

He assured them that he would also engage with those duty bearers to extend those interventions to the communities and called for their support in that regard.

The LEAP Programme is the Government of Ghana’s flagship Social Protection intervention, which was initiated in 2008 to reduce poverty among the extremely poor and vulnerable households in the country.