Forty per cent of Ghanaians have second jobs

An estimated 40 per cent of Ghanaians have second jobs as a means of supplementing their main incomes, a survey has revealed. The Cost of Living Survey 2000, conducted by Ghanalert, an NGO, said it was obvious that most people are not adequately paid, making them develop different strategies to cope with difficult living conditions.

For these mean income was 241,026 cedis and a median income of 100,000 cedis with a range of 20,000 to 1.7 million cedis. For the entire survey, the median income from main economic activity was 180,000 cedis with a mean of 236,000 cedis and a range of 25,000 cedis and 1.5 million cedis.

The document said a monthly expenditure pattern data was used to estimate the benchmark income levels of personal income. This was done because the survey data did not adequately address actual levels of personal income of the average worker.

Such benchmark expenditure suggests that the average Ghanaian requires a monthly income of 684,000 cedis in order to have minimum comfort.

The objective of the survey funded by DANIDA (Danish International Development Agency) was to determine how well individual Ghanaians have been faring in their daily socio-economic activities.

It identified the standard of living of average Ghanaians in terms of basic needs like shelter, food, education and health. It also looked at the differences in living conditions of the urban and rural population and also established the perception of the general population about the economy in relationship to their individual circumstances over the past years.

The survey found that those in second jobs most often take to trading, while others with special qualifications seek jobs akin to their original employment. Individual data was collected between March and April 2000.

Information was gathered on the background of respondents' economic activity, perceptions about the national economy, including infrastructure development, and a market survey on food and non-food expenditures, health issues and adaptive strategies, and informal safety nets.

One of the cardinal conclusions of the survey, was that 89 per cent are of the view that cost of living has generally increased in recent times. "Estimates of income and expenditure profiles in Ghana tend to exhibit a considerable shortfall of household income as compared to household expenditure."

The Study said 45 per cent of respondents shop daily for food, compared to the 39 per cent who shop weekly or the eight per cent who do so monthly.

Twenty-five per cent of respondents said they stopped buying some of the food items which they were purchasing in the past year as a result of increases in prices - these were rice (six per cent) vegetables (four per cent), fish/meat (three per cent) and yam (three per cent).

The survey said the expenditure level of the poor remained virtually the same from the previous year's level. "An interpretation is that whereas the rich have been able to adjust their expenditure levels upward, the poor have to cope with the same level of expenditure pattern in response to cost of living."

The poor were also found to be spending less on every item including housing, energy and utilities than their rich counterparts. Some 25 per cent of the respondents said they had stopped buying some of their favourite food items that they used to last year because income is no longer enough to purchase them.

Of the number, 52.4 per cent said they could simply not afford the prices, 17.9 per cent attributed the non-affordability to poor harvest while five per cent attributed the cause to the fact that they now have more mouths to feed than before.

Similarly, 34.4 per cent of the respondents said they now have to reduce the quantity of food items purchased because of the high cost of living. The Survey said despite all the strategies adopted to cope with the difficult conditions, 22.9 per cent of the sample feel their households eat better in terms of quantity and quality than before.

It said 41.7 per cent felt they were worse off; 28.8 per cent felt there was no difference in the quality and quantity of their household foods while 6.7 per cent had difficulty telling the difference in their consumption pattern now and a year ago.

For some, according to the survey, a way to cope with the existing economic difficulties is to have their children drop out of school. These number 11.5 per cent of the sample size, with 2.3 per cent withdrawing one child and 2.5 per cent withdrawing between two and four of their children from school in the past year.

The survey concluded that one single factor that would appear to have given an unpleasant taste to the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) is the liberalisation of the economy to the extent that it is solely market forces that determine the prices of goods and services.

"At a glance the service sector appears to be the only sector to benefit from trade liberalisation as is manifest in such activities like trading, proliferation of NGOs, FM stations and the private newspaper industry.

"While no group is more vulnerable to foreign competition than Ghanaian rural farmers, the pressure on selling the national currency, the cedi, in the open market for hard currencies for relatively cheap commodity imports has almost destabilised the economy thus exacerbating an already bad situation."