Battor, North Tongu – June 26, 2024
The North Tongu District Assembly, through its District Statistical Department, held a dissemination meeting on the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) Report, developed by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS). The session, organized at the Planning and Statistics Office of the Assembly, followed a two-day regional dissemination workshop held for 18 Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in the Volta Region.
The meeting, attended by ten members of the District Planning and Coordinating Unit (DPCU), sought to share insights from the MPI report and discuss strategies to address poverty from multiple dimensions, including health, education, living standards, and employment beyond income measures alone.
According to the Ghana Statistical Service, the MPI aims to provide a clearer picture of deprivation across different sectors, enabling targeted interventions, better monitoring of local government development programs, tracking of poverty trends, and assessing progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Participating departments included Central Administration, Health, Education, Social Welfare, Agriculture, Budget, Business Advisory Centre, Works, Planning, and Environmental Health. Officials discussed how the report’s findings could guide policy and project implementation. In education, discussions focused on improving school attendance and reducing dropout rates; in health, expanding insurance coverage and reducing maternal mortality; in sanitation, tackling poor toilet facilities and water access; and in employment, identifying solutions to youth unemployment.
Findings from the District Snapshot revealed that North Tongu’s household population is 109,059, with a poverty incidence of 38.4% and poverty intensity of 45.4%. The district’s highest areas of deprivation were employment (28%), health insurance coverage (23.2%), school lag (10.6%), toilet facilities (7.6%), and school attendance (6.3%).
The data also showed that female-headed households experienced higher multidimensional poverty (43.2%) compared to males (34.6%). Larger households faced greater deprivation (55.7%) than smaller ones (32.6%), and those without formal education had significantly higher poverty rates (55.5%) than those with tertiary education (12%).
In terms of occupation, individuals in public sector employment had the lowest MPI at 4.8%, while those in the private informal sector recorded 34.5%, and the unemployed 64.1%. By economic sector, agriculture had the highest poverty rate (46.9%), followed by industry (19.4%) and services (13.5%).
Among the top 20 communities in the district, Deve No. 1 (Mempeasem) had the highest poverty rate at 83.3%, while Fodzoku had the lowest at 14%. North Tongu ranked 17th out of 18 districts in the Volta Region and 208th out of 261 districts nationwide on the MPI scale.
The dissemination exercise emphasized the need for data-driven planning and targeted development policies to address poverty more effectively in North Tongu, aligning with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Agenda 2063, and Ghana’s Medium-Term Development Policy Framework (2022–2025).
