The reason why is that in recent years, Ghana has seen something rare in Africa: promising economic growth, in the form of rising GDP and a dropping poverty rate.
But as the numbers began rolling out in recent weeks, they struck some people as counterintuitive: Amid the longest peacetime expansion ever, median income actually dropped and poverty rose in a handful of surprising places.
Assessment of how households had performed over a period of 20 years showed that agro-pastoral households were more resilient, as very few of such households dropped into poverty following environmental and economic shocks.
No amount of personal means is going to protect them from the consequences of billions of unemployed people with middle-class expectations suddenly dropped into poverty.
In the first two years of this recovery, according to new report from Census Bureau, about one in three Americans dropped into poverty for at least two to six months.
Social Security lifted 8.4 million women out of poverty in 2010, dropping the poverty rate among women over 65 from 49% to just 11percentt.
In a study of growth and poverty in 14 developing countries, the authors found that poverty dropped in the 11 countries that experienced substantial growth, and rose in the three that saw little or no growth.
Between 1995/96 and 2005/6, the percentage of the population living below the poverty line (US$1/day) decreased from 42% to 31%, and the absolute poverty dropped by one percentage points per year over the past couple of years.
Tens of millions of people have dropped below the poverty line.
