Towards a paradigm shift in social protection in developing countries? Analysing the emergence of the Ghana national unemployment insurance scheme from a multiple streams perspective

Abstract

The COVID 19 pandemic continues to cause a lot of uncertainty around the world. At the onset of the pandemic, governments responded with policies and programs to curb its devastating effects on citizens, and Ghana was no exception. Although the Ghanaian government introduced various stop-gap measures to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, the inadequacies of the extant social welfare system was badly exposed. Consequently, as the pandemic seethed on, there were calls for reform of the existing social protection system and the introduction of new programs, especially for those in the informal sector. In response, the government introduced a new National Unemployment Insurance Scheme (NUIS). How did this happen? What led the government to accept tentatively the need to reform and transform the social welfare system after years of policy padding and the dragging of feet? Drawing on Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework, we argue that the pandemic created a policy window, which enabled policy enntrepreneurs to push the unemployment insurance idea to reform the existing social welfare system. The introduction of a NUIS, is seen as a paradigm shift in social protection and more broadly in social policy. The objective of this paper is to examine how the NUIS got on government’s agenda, and whether the NUIS is a game changer in social protection in Ghana. We sourced information mainly from secondary sources.