Agnes Naa Momo Lartey, the Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, has stated that President John Dramani Mahama is poised to pursue pro-active measures to address social protection issues, to reduce vulnerability drastically.

“The President wants more proactive measures and systems that will address social protection issues to reduce vulnerabilities of people drastically”

Mrs Momo Lartey, who made this known at a meeting in Accra, mentioned that government would remain committed to enhancing all programmes geared towards alleviating the plight of the ordinary Ghanaian.

The meeting with Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), was to focused on gender, children and social protection issues and to court the support of stakeholders for strengthened relationship with the Ministry.

The Minister in her address, mentioned the National School Feeding Programme (NSFP) as one of the interventions that the President sought the ministry to enhance and expand, to ensure that “it’s not just feeding but providing a nutritious meal to solve a problem”.

Mrs Momo Lartey indicated that decentralisation of the Programme to increase enrolment and meet the core objective, was therefore one of the plans the ministry intended to pursue to strengthen the NSFP and ensure value for money.

Whiles commending the CSOs for their longstanding support and cooperation, she called on them to come on board to support the ministry, to be able to achieve its target for the benefit of all Ghanaians.

Some of the critical issues that were raised at the meeting were the implementation of the Affirmative Action and Gender Equity Act, Child Protection issues, the Domestic Violence Fund and resource mobilisation.

Notable among the participants at the meeting were Dr Angela Dwamena-Aboagye of the Ark Foundation, Dr Charity Binka, Ghana Chapter President of the African Women Leaders Network (AWLN), Mrs Hamida Harrison of Abantu for Development and convenor of the Women’s Manifesto Coalition and Mrs Joana Opare, an eminent member of the National Peace Council among others.