Successive governments, non-governmental organisations, policymakers and development practitioners must move beyond cash hand-outs and short-term relief interventions if Ghana is to eradicate poverty sustainably, a lecturer at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Professor Prince Osei-Wusu Adjei, has urged.

Professor Adjei, who lectures at the Department of Geography and Rural Development, said achieving the goals of ending poverty in all its forms, promoting gender equality and empowering women would require stakeholders to adopt what he termed the basic means approach (BMA).

“The most effective way to eradicate poverty using the BMA is by identifying, providing and/or strengthening the means (assets and capabilities) required by the poor and vulnerable to engage in productive livelihood activities to derive desirable livelihood outcomes including assets re-mobilization,” he said.

He delivered the remarks during his professorial inaugural lecture at the Great Hall of the university on the theme “Eradicating poverty in the age of sustainable development: The basic means approach”.

The lecture, attended by university management, colleagues, family members and students from selected senior high schools, marked the beginning of a series of inaugural lectures for the academic year.

Professor Adjei argued that poverty reduction and social policy interventions aligned with the requirements of the BMA at both micro and macro levels were more likely to be viable and sustainable.

Drawing on his experience monitoring and evaluating interventions such as Ghana’s Livelihood Empowerment against Poverty and the Rural Enterprise Programme, he said the BMA created an enabling context for empowering the poor and strengthening their productive capacities.

According to him, this approach would guarantee independence, assertiveness and resilience among vulnerable groups, helping to free them from poverty through self-help initiatives and sustainable local livelihoods.

He observed that since the 1980s, successive political administrations, working with development partners, had pursued various macro and micro socio-economic policies aimed at alleviating poverty. Citing reports from the Ghana Statistical Service based on the Ghana Living Standards Survey, he acknowledged that official data showed significant reductions in poverty levels from the 1990s to date.

“However, evidence from our participatory rural poverty assessment of multidimensional poverty indicators (MPI) based on qualitative self-reported cases has unravelled some disturbing manifestations of poverty across the country’s rural and urban districts, showing a huge mismatch between the reported statistics in the books, and lived experiences on the ground,” he said.

He further contended that many poverty reduction initiatives had focused on symptoms rather than root causes. “Moreover, most of Ghana’s poverty reduction and social policy interventions have often tackled the symptoms and not the disease, the needs and not the means,” he stated.

On gender disparities, Professor Adjei said the proportion of women given opportunities for economic and political participation remained extremely low compared to men, with a sharp decline since 2015 despite improvements in women’s educational attainment. He called for deliberate policy interventions and affirmative action measures to enhance women’s economic participation and political empowerment.

Without such planned policies and affirmative action across institutions and sectors, he cautioned, improved educational attainment alone would not automatically translate into greater economic and political opportunities for women.

The Vice-Chancellor of KNUST, Rita Akosua Dickson, who chaired the event, said eradicating poverty had long been central to socio-economic development efforts.

She expressed optimism that the recommendations from the lecture, if adopted, would help address poverty more effectively in the country.