Government is to make pregnant women and infants in extreme poor households beneficiaries of the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme.

The initiative is under a “LEAP 1000” initiative being introduced by UNICEF and USAID.

Mr Sampson Nii Trebi, Acting Director of Social Welfare, said this on Monday when opening a two-day workshop for District Social Welfare Offices, Statistics Officers and Regional Community Care Programme Heads in Ho.

He said the new initiative to begin in 10 districts in the Northern and Upper-East regions “is to prevent stunting, underweight and general malnutrition amongst children during the first one-thousand (1000) days of their lives (from pregnancy to two years)”.

Mr Trebi said the Ministry of Gender Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP) was in the process of establishing a “National Targeting System Unit to develop a National Single Registry Database of the extreme poor and the vulnerable to be called the ‘Ghana National Household Registry’”.

He said the “database will be used by all Social Protection interventions to select and enroll beneficiaries for their respective interventions.”

The two-day workshop was to equip the officers with LEAP programme beneficiary targeting skills as the programme expands to cover an additional 50, 000 households across the 10 regions of Ghana.

Mr Trebi said some 76,931 households in 103 districts were listed by September 2014 to be on the programme, started on trial basis in 2008, with 1,654 beneficiary households in 21 districts.

“The essence of your presence here is to be equipped with the requisite skills and knowledge about the LEAP to effectively target the additional 50,000 households for enrolment unto the Programme in 2014/2015,” Mr Trebi stated.

He said all outstanding arrears of the LEAP grant had been paid and that beneficiaries “now receive regular payments bi-monthly as required by the programme design”.

Mr Trebi said “through the LEAP Programme government is improving the lives of poor, vulnerable and excluded citizens, reducing the level of poverty in the nation and improving their socio-economic standard.”

Dzigbordi Kofi Agbekpornu, LEAP Programme Manager, said the country had been zoned into two for the training.

He said by the close of the sessions participants should know how to collect data on the targets for selection through Proxy Means Text (PMT).

The LEAP is a social cash transfer program which provides cash and health insurance to extremely poor households across Ghana to alleviate short-term poverty and encourage long term human capital development.

It is being implemented by the Department of Social Welfare (DSW) with support from development partners such as UK’s DFDI, UNICEF and World Bank