GPRS: Ghana's Poverty Reduction Strategy

In Ghana today, hospital patients have to pay for everything including emergency treatment, child birth, surgery, drugs, and cotton wool. This is as a result of the so-called “cash and carry” policy brought about by Ghana’s indebtedness to the IMF.

Patients are not discharged from hospital unless fees have been paid.

Ghana’s poor have to pay for all the essentials of life, for education, for clean drinking water, and to go to the toilet. Payment is required to use public toilets and those without means to pay have to beg to use toilet facilities.

The IMF though states that Ghana is at “full cost recovery”.

The IMF is an international... organization established… to foster economic growth and high levels of employment; and to provide temporary financial assistance to countries to help ease balance of payments adjustment

The Bank states as its purposes, inter alia, to make general resources of the Fund temporarily available to correct maladjustments in balance of payments without resorting to measures destructive of national or international prosperity.

Some Ghanaians have to subsist on about ?2 a week. Land previously farmed and which provided source of living have been sold to transnational mining corporations with minimal compensation. Katanga valley that used to have an abundant rice production now imports rice as a result of the IMF stating that subsidies for rice production were to stop. Ghanaians now eat American rice that is subsidised.

The transnational corporations operate almost tax-free for up to 10 years and environmental and other regulations are kept to a minimum.

According to Yao Graham, a Ghanaian activist believses the situation will become worse than it currently is unless there is international political will to rectify the situation. "We're living in a world where so many people are feeling taken for granted," he tells me, "that unless the big powers become more sensitive to the demands of weaker countries, all of us are endangered."

The new Ghanain government elected in 2000 in response has set up the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy which will include as part of its strategy debt relief