Identifying Beneficiaries in Ghana’s Donor-Oriented Welfare State

Points

Identifying Beneficiaries in Ghana’s Donor-Oriented Welfare State

By Alena Thiel

March 23, 2022

In Ghana’s fundamentally donor-oriented welfare state, aid agencies contribute substantially to welfare funding and therefore exert substantial influence over the composition and determinants of social protection programs. Donors regularly act as vectors of technology-centered ideas of development, promoting, notably, technological solutions for the problem of identifying eligible populations when the latter remain to a large extent invisible in the country’s incomplete civil registration, national ID, and address systems.

This post traces Ghana’s commitment to identifying those populations most in need of social protection, and the infrastructural choices, including biometric systems, resulting from this commitment and attempts to meet it.

History

As Thandika Mkandawire remarks, African social protection systems are rooted in colonial histories of disinvestment in formal social security systems and population data infrastructure alike, thus requiring careful targeting and distribution of limited resources.

In the context of Ghana, Ama de-Graft Aikins and others describe how, following Ghanaian Independence from Britain in 1957, rich mineral and natural resources at first fueled the Nkrumah government’s ambitions towards universal social protection measures, most prominently free health care. Yet dire economic conditions under Ghana’s succession of military regimes in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in the gradual scrapping of benefits and the introduction of a pay-as-you-go health care system. The adoption of the Structural Adjustment Program in 1983 led to further reductions in public spending, with far-reaching consequences for welfare interventions. Non-kin forms of support, Eduard Grebe notes, “were chiefly provided by churches and missionaries, supplanted by secular welfare organizations after independence, including by international NGOs that became an important conduit of foreign aid from the 1960s onwards.”

With the return to democracy in 1992, social rights, ranging from universal primary education and health care to the right to shelter, were anchored in the new constitution. International aid agencies have since been at the forefront of the Ghanaian social protection agenda.

In the late 1990s, the World Bank, IMF, and other creditors designed the Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC) to provide debt relief and assistance to the poorest countries in the world. The HIPC required these countries to establish a track record of reform and develop a Poverty Reduction Strategy as a condition to receive assistance. This strategy (GPRS I in Ghana) was based on a logic of accelerated economic growth and employment creation. However, as William Baah-Boateng writes, clearly defined indicators were lacking and whom to target for the programs remained a core question.

In the early 2000s, economic growth substantially expanded the budget for renewed investments in social protection, among them: a contributory health insurance system (2003); free primary education (2004); daily hot meals for school children (2005); and voluntary retirement savings (2008). In 2008, the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) cash transfer program joined the existing measures.

To this day, these systems represent the cornerstones of Ghana’s social protection system, and LEAP has evolved into the flagship program of its welfare state. Co-funded by the World Bank, and with further assistance from (UK) DFID, USAID, and UNICEF, LEAP has brought about a shift in targeting, focusing — in the logic of the then Millennium Development Goals — on the category of “extreme poverty.” In addition, new category-based welfare measures were introduced in connection with LEAP as part of the National Social Protection Strategy (NSPS), covering free health insurance for LEAP beneficiaries, in addition to children and pregnant women.

Throughout the evolution of the Ghanaian social protection system, commitment to identify those most in need has been at the forefront. But the country’s historically incomplete civil registration and vital statistics system has complicated identification of beneficiaries and their enrollment in suitable programs, as well as the logistics of interventions in the absence of standardized residential addresses or banking infrastructure.

Multiple Identification Systems

In response to these conditions, Ghana’s welfare agencies started developing individual responses to issues of identifying beneficiaries in the 2000s.

In particular, the agencies adopted the idea of biometric identification as key to leapfrogging development.

Because of repeated delays in the introduction of Ghana’s national ID system since its inception in 2003, several Ghanaian government agencies proceeded to set up their own biometric identification systems. Giulia Piccolino, for example, describes the rationales and consequences of building a biometric voter register to de-duplicate the national voter roll.

Within the welfare system, the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) introduced personal ID cards as early as 2003. In what were initially district-level insurance registers, NHIS first implemented a magnetic, card-based identification system. This system failed for multiple reasons ranging from delays because of its three-month production process to the inability to deliver cards to their owners; consequently, a solution provided by Dutch company Genkey was adopted, which instantly issued a card.

In a similar development, the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) introduced its own biometric chip card to manage entitlements, seeking to reduce duplicate registrations, false claims, and fraud related to biographic data (for example false representation of age to secure pensions ). In 2016, biometric self-service terminals were added, allowing citizens to manage their SSNIT accounts without face-to-face interaction with the agency.

LEAP, in turn, while not relying on its own ID cards, adopted the biometric banking and payment system ezwich for automation of benefit transfers.

What place do international aid agencies occupy in the techno-political arrangement around welfare provision?

Ethnographies of aid have pointed to the role of circulating technologies and their reception in local contexts. With the emergence of social protection in Ghana’s development agenda, international aid agencies have directed the Ghanaian welfare system toward targets set by the Millennium Development Goals, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, and the Sustainable Development Goals, all of which included specific prescriptions for categories of welfare recipients and associated blueprints for intervention. For pursuing these targets and prescriptions, aid agencies have connected Ghanaian welfare institutions to project-based cycles of technology adoption, including:

biometric identification;
digital payment solutions;
mobile health technologies;
app-based interfaces promising to populate health and other registers burdened by low registration coverage, while also enabling inter-agency data journeys and data production; and
dashboards and the automation of quantitative analyses of key development indicators.

The project-logic of development interventions often produces discontinuities in methods and technologies, generating high costs in time and personnel while rendering previous progress obsolete. Continuity in development programming is therefore seen as preferable to chasing the latest technological innovations, as high-level planners have told me during my research.

Targeting Technologies

Ghanaian welfare institutions have joined efforts in targeting recipients. Designed with the help of the World Bank and UNICEF, Ghana’s central National Household Registry was established in 2015 for streamlined, cross-agency identification of welfare beneficiaries.

And in 2021, the promise of data infrastructure interoperability led to the merging of Ghana’s fragmented ID systems under the central national identity register of the National Identification Authority. Both SSNIT and NHIS cards are currently being integrated under the National Identification Number, along with Tax Identifiers and, recently, SIM card registrations. In view of the critique of technological discontinuity I heard from planners, these efforts at integrating Ghana’s fragmented ID systems are a positive signal towards the consolidation of the identification infrastructure.

These systems promise to enhance capacities for future welfare targeting, and they will potentially have consequential effects on incremental and emerging infrastructural decisions on citizenship, inclusion, and welfare.

They may also engender emergent categories of beneficiaries at the intersections of not only donor priorities and extant welfare schemes, but also registration of citizen data, its circulation across welfare agencies, and its subsequent interpretation to determine eligibility and access. These priorities and processes do not seamlessly map onto or follow from each other. They require constant re-specification and management. Building a mindful digital welfare state requires careful observation of the seams of these priorities and processes to identify who falls into their cracks and how they can be supported to navigate its gaps.

Alena Thiel is a social anthropologist currently researching biometric identification technologies and quantitative knowledge production in Ghana. Her recent work has appeared in Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society and The Journal of Modern African Studies. She is a member of the Law, Organization, Science and Technology research network (LOST).

Identifying Beneficiaries in Ghana’s Donor-Oriented Welfare State is the fifth post in Towards a Mindful Digital Welfare State, a series investigating data-driven state services, commissioned by Ranjit Singh and Emnet Tafesse at the AI on the Ground Initiative at Data & Society, with editorial support from Seth Young.

To date, the series also includes: