 Mr. Chair, as I have been introduced, my name is Payford Mainz-Zairakwa and I'm presenting this paper. It's actually a work in progress paper on behalf of my two other colleagues, Robert Bakonsei and then Isaac Osayaputo. This is actually a motivation that we had from some things we went with it two years ago where we tried to look at or evaluate the cash transfer program that the Government of Ghana initiated. This paper, poverty and happiness are an examination of the factors influencing happiness among extreme poor in Ghana. Now that program essentially looked at people who, according to the Ghana State Living Standards Survey, are considered poor. So the target population for the intervention were people who are considered at the extreme 20% bottom of the poverty line. And so more or less a poor of the poor. And so that is by way of outline, I want to give some brief background and then the approach we are adopting and some basic results that we have found so far. You know, how many of us here don't want to be happy in life? I guess we all try to aspire at different points to get some level of happiness. And the desire for happiness, according to the literature and other scholars, it's an enough fulfillment and it comes as a result of several factors. So what, for example, might be happiness for me is completely different from what might be happiness for the other person. And again, it is not the concept of happiness, it's not just one indicator that I have achieved A and so I am happy in life. It is quite complex and so it's become a subject of interest to a lot of scholars in recent times, not just psychologists who were looking at happiness in the past, but can amaze another scholar interested in that. Now they argue that the search for happiness is the ultimate goal of human action. And so whatever we are doing, for example, I want to, you know, publish a paper or you want to get a particular degree, you want to obtain some asset, you know, you get that and you think, ah, yes, I made it. But after getting that, you realize that, yeah, it just lasts for a while and you want to get something else, you know. It's, however, a well-documented fact that one single factor, as I said, does not necessarily, you know, define happiness of an individual. And so if we are looking at these group of people who we consider poor and so we want to, more or less, the idea is to smoothen their consumption level, is that going to help them, you know, become happy or it is just enough to say, OK, we've helped you and so we think we've done our best. So if you critically review the literature across all spectrum of our discipline, you see that it is a combination of demographic factors, a combination of psychological, physiological, you know, and other behavioral characteristics that interplay to more or less explain someone's level of happiness. By way of approach, as I indicated from the start, the sample for this particular paper is drawn from, you know, a household study that we did and it looked at the bottom 20% of the extreme poor population according to the DLSS fight and DLSS is Ghana Level Standard Survey and we had a little over 1,500 households who were actually recruited to take part in this particular piece of work looking at both beneficiaries of the cash transfer program and non-beneficiaries alike. So the whole idea is, OK, for those who are considered poor in the same category and some group of them are receiving some benefit, does that make them happier relative to their counterparts who are not receiving any form of support. So each household head, of course, the most knowledgeable person or the most influential person within the system-making process in the household was interviewed and of course from the review of literature you see that other people would use, especially psychologists, several persons to form an index to be able to say, OK, this person is happy or not but the approach here is that given all the ups and downs, given all the, you know, irregularities among several other factors if you are to assess your own life to see whether or not you are happy or not, what is your position and so then they are given the opportunity to answer, yes, they are happy in life or they are not. And that becomes our dependent variable and when we introduce, of course, different covariates that we suspect strongly could influence their level of happiness and we run the model. Let me just quickly run you through some results. The first is the marital status of the people who responded to our questions and this, for example, is very important to us given the kind of people who are beneficiaries of the cash transfer. Usually you find that these are people who are very old, aged people, orphans and vulnerable children and so there is always somebody who is a cortical and so we are very interested in this variable trying to understand the marital status of the people and here you find that about, majority of them, of course, about 41% are mild but for me the interesting part is the group who are widowed and you see quite soon why most of the people, as I go through you see if you see the widowed group of people that divorced, never married these are people, if you begin to consider they are ages you would understand better. So usually it's a grandmother or grandfather of an orphan or somebody or somebody who has no other person and so has decided to volunteer his or her time to take care of somebody who is considered to be needy in society. For the age category, the average age across gender we see to be about 60 years so it gives you an idea of the kind of people who really are taking care of, who are the caregivers of these cash transfer programmes but of course with female being in slightly older than the male counterparts. Now religion is a very, of course, tricky variable but we also were interested in understanding whether or not this variable may play a role in trying to see or explain the extent of happiness among beneficiary households and we see of course this just mimicking the general population the religious affiliation of the general population Christians in the dominant and then followed by Muslim and traditional religion. The type of housing units that they live in were also of interest to us whether or not if a beneficiary or a household benefiting from the transfer programme lives in their own more or less flat or they live in a compound house they all have implications in defining what would make them happy and we see that of course for most of the respondents about half the respondents they live in a compound house and the compound house is a central ground that there are several other household units that live in there and so they live in compound houses that they have access to more than one room within that unit or that housing structure now we find of course some other variables for example a great number of rooms are available to these people I just mentioned compound house so within that unit housing structure you find that they have at least or about three rooms that are available to them then also of interest all of them are of interest to us but also of interest I want to highlight is the proportion of households raising livestock of course some have argued that if people are raising livestock and they have other income generated activities it may influence consumption patterns and also has implications for nutrition and so possibly might influence the level of happiness about 56% of them indicated that they raise one livestock or the other and this could be maybe a fowl or goat or sorry but at least they raise a livestock proportion only money or goods to other people and so these are people who are poor in the first place and so we want to understand whether or not that knowing that you don't have money you are needy but you are also indebted to other people as that influence your happiness level and about 25% or about 26% indicated that yes they either owe money or some goods to other individuals within the community to proportion of households receiving institutional transfers and my main interest, variable of interest is this variable, proportion of households who actually receive institutional transfers and I indicated earlier that we looked at persons or households who are receiving the transfer and those who are not receiving the transfer and a little about 39% of respondents who are used in this analysis indicated that yes they receive the cash transfer program what does the results say we find quite interesting that for households that actually live in a compound house that has other households living within that compound house their chances of being happy is positive and that is also significant statistically then we find also that for households who are indebted whether in cash or in goods to other people it actually declines or reduces their probability of being happy of course if you look at this the fact that I owe you and I'm not too sure where I'm going to get the money from and you may come up at any point in time to demand your money it brings about some level of social pressure where it becomes quite difficult for you to effectively participate effectively take part in decision making because you're not too sure when the next person is coming to ask you for their money or goods now however just as it is for indebtedness to the household if other people owe money to the household or money that are supposed to come to the household though they don't have it that influences or increases has the tendency or probability of making them happy so I know that I don't have money today but I know somebody owes me that gives me some hope and gives me some joy that all hope is not lost and for households who are fortunate and operated an agricultural plot at least in the last 12 months they also have a very high probability of being happy another interesting variable which actually I misinterpretation is those who operate non-farm businesses or non-farm enterprises where we try to look at whether or not these households apart from that the cultural activities they may be engaged in do they have any form of activity that brings money to the household that makes them see or exchange basic enterprise whether repairing, whether selling ice water or so ever and positively for a household that does any of these it enhances the probability that they are a happy household now my interest variable which is the institutional transfer trying to look at for those who actually are receiving institutional transfers of course given the fact that you receive transfers and your other colleagues the same level with you don't receive we expect that you should be happier unfortunately they have a negative sign to their coefficient basically saying that those who have been who had been enrolled on the cash transfer program contrary to what we had this morning in a Brazilian experience they were less happy and so again it became quite of an interest to us and the explanation to that is society in itself has a way of taking care of the poor before the cash transfer program came in a way that people were surviving society had measures in which everybody knows that Mrs A or Mr B has poor and there was a way of taking care of them but once your name comes up that you are going to receive this from government or you are now a recipient of some intervention it's naturally cut off some people who would have either to come to your aid otherwise you will be better off than them anyway and so unfortunately the cash transfer program though started very well has not really received consistency in terms of dispersal and so the people have been enlisted and they receive the money for a few months and they are not too sure that the next tranche of transfers were coming and so over time instead of getting help from neighbors and society that is not coming government support is also not coming and so that potentially explains what makes them unhappy although they have been enlisted to receive cash transfers from the government all we are saying with this piece of work is that households receiving institutional transfers have a higher likelihood of being unhappy and the explanation is what I just gave you operating on a local shop plot and a non-form activity we found to be you know to have a positive influence on extreme poor's happiness and so are these potentially variables and things that we can policy makers can begin to look at as we design new programs so that is not just cash transfer but can we look at strengthening the things that make them happy as part of the border design framework and you know instead of identifying people or allowing people to be in isolation of course living in a compound house once I know that I can observe and know that the whole day you have not taken any mail if I'm cooking definitely I may pass on something little to you with myself some problem in the interim whereas if you were just on your own somewhere you know you are hungry and you might just be hungry yourself and no one might know about it and so it's a thing that we are beginning to question and asking whether are there words and begin to look at some of these things in designing our policies to achieve greater efficiency happiness declines with households who are inducted I already mentioned that and a variable we find quite interesting not very strong but at least if we stretch our statistic analysis to about 10% level of significance we find this to be an influencing factor as household headed households that have or Muslim headed households they tend to be happier relative to the other religions again for us is there something unique about the way they do things that potentially we can give some attention and understand some more to be able to help improve one's situation thank you for your attention thank you very much for making it exactly on time