Disability and Social Protection in Ghana

The book offers valuable insights into contemporary debates on disability and the development of social protection systems in Ghana and other countries of the so-called Global South, addressing perspectives that have received limited attention in existing scholarship. By integrating historical perspectives and contemporary philosophical debates on African conceptions of community, personhood, reciprocity, and social justice with resource theories and empirical evidence, the author develops a nuanced framework for understanding the relationship between public and indigenous social protection. Based on the experiences and perspectives of users with disabilities, the study offers new insights into the complementarity of state and indigenous social protection structures and their significance for inclusive development.
Over the past decades, public social protection has emerged as a critical pillar of the international development discourse. Social protection programmes in countries of the so-called Global South have undergone systematic expansion, driven by multilateral and bilateral development agencies. This trajectory is also evident in Ghana, where a neoliberal approach to social protection, centred primarily on targeted transfers for specific groups, was established in the wake of structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s and 90s. Among other critiques, it has been challenged for isolating vulnerability from the broader systemic processes that have produced the very conditions it seeks to address. At a practical level, this meta-critique is closely connected to the issue of context responsiveness in social protection schemes, a concern that lies at the core of this study's research focus.
Ghana’s current social protection schemes operate predominantly as economic interventions, often overlooking other forms of resources that complement economic support and are essential for sustaining livelihoods. This study focuses on these diverse resource forms, as well as the dynamics and institutional rules that govern their access, exchange and conservation. While social protection interventions are typically designed on the assumption that they align with the individual resource arrangements and needs of their intended beneficiaries, empirical evidence suggests only a weak correlation between externally defined resource perspectives and individuals’ subjective assessments of their resource situations. This discrepancy poses a significant challenge for the design and implementation of social protection schemes.
The study examines selected public social protection programmes in Ghana – the Disability Common Fund, Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP), and the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) – and their implications for the livelihoods of persons with disabilities. Drawing on qualitative interviews with programme users, disability advocates, and social welfare practitioners, it explores the explicit and implicit assumptions about beneficiaries’ individual resource arrangements that shape design and implementation practices of these programmes. It analyses the demands these assumptions place on recipients and assesses the extent to which they align with beneficiaries’ lived realities and perspectives.