Ghana’s level of multidimensional poverty is projected to fall sharply by the third quarter of 2026, with nearly one million people expected to move out of deprivation within a year, according to new official data released on Wednesday.
The country’s multidimensional poverty rate is forecast to decline from 24.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2024 to 21.9 percent by the third quarter of 2025, Government Statistician Alhassan Iddrisu said at the launch of the 2024 Q1–2025 Q3 Multidimensional Poverty Report.
Multidimensional poverty is a non-monetary measure that captures deprivation across several aspects of living standards, including health, education and housing conditions. The index ranges from zero, indicating no deprivation, to one, indicating complete deprivation across all indicators.
According to the report, Ghana recorded notable progress between mid-2024 and mid-2025. In the third quarter of 2025, an estimated 7.2 million people were classified as multidimensionally poor, compared with 8.1 million in the same period a year earlier.
“About 950,000 people moved out of multidimensional poverty between the third quarter of 2024 and the third quarter of 2025,” Iddrisu said. He added that more than 360,000 people exited multidimensional poverty between the second and third quarters of 2025 alone.
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Despite the improvement, the report cautioned that poverty reduction remains uneven across the country. Rural areas continue to record significantly higher levels of deprivation than urban centres, while some regions face more entrenched poverty challenges than others.
“The progress we are seeing is real, but it is not evenly shared,” Iddrisu said. “Multidimensional poverty remains much higher in rural communities and is more endemic in certain regions.”
The report identified health and living conditions as the biggest drivers of deprivation. Key pressure points include limited health insurance coverage, poor nutrition, overcrowded housing and inadequate sanitation facilities.
“These are the areas where households continue to experience the greatest strain,” the Government Statistician said, noting that access to basic services remains a decisive factor in overall wellbeing.
Iddrisu stressed that the findings should be viewed as a call to action rather than a statistical exercise. “These numbers are signals for government, businesses, labour unions, civil society, development partners and households,” he said. “They show us where to focus resources, what to fix first and how to protect vulnerable people.”
He highlighted the growing risk faced by individuals experiencing what he described as a “triple burden” of poverty, unemployment and food insecurity, particularly among younger people and low-income households.
The report made several policy recommendations, urging the government to expand enrolment and renewal under the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), improve sanitation infrastructure and access to safe water, and strengthen school feeding and education support programmes.
It also called for increased social protection spending, including targeted expansion of the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme, alongside broader efforts to scale up skills development and job creation.
Businesses and the private sector were encouraged to support NHIS enrolment for informal workers, invest in housing quality, water and sanitation projects, and create more decent jobs, particularly for young people and small-scale entrepreneurs.
The report also urged companies to design inclusive employment opportunities for vulnerable groups, including persons with disabilities, and to support education through scholarships, internships and training programmes.
At the household level, the report recommended maintaining active health insurance coverage, keeping children consistently in school, improving household nutrition and participating in skills and livelihood programmes such as apprenticeships.
Ghana has in recent years adopted multidimensional poverty measurement to complement traditional income-based indicators, allowing policymakers to better capture the complex realities of deprivation and track progress toward inclusive growth.
