ACRC has published a new paper exploring the urban development challenges facing Accra, Ghana. Authored by Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai, the report synthesises studies conducted by in-city researchers, exploring how the political landscape and urban systems have influenced the city’s development trajectory and shaped reform processes.
As Ghana’s capital, Accra is the country’s main connection with the global economy and also its most populous swing voting city, making it a key electoral battleground for political parties. This research focused on the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA), which covers 1,494 km2 and has a population of about 5 million people – an estimated 38% of whom reside in informal settlements.
Urban development domains
The domain research in Accra focused on five key areas: structural transformation, neighbourhood and district economic development, land and connectivity, housing and informal settlements. The report argues that substantial and sustained progress has not been recorded in any of these urban development domains over the past two decades, as a result of various systemic and political challenges, along with generally weak enforcement capabilities of state actors.
The research found that structural transformation has not occurred to any significant degree in Accra, with changes only involving labour movement from low-productivity agricultural jobs to other equally low-productive activities in non-tradable services and manufacturing. Employment opportunities are increasingly concentrated in services-oriented activities, making Accra a “consumption city”.
Land tenure security remains a significant problem in the city, despite several land administration reforms since the 1990s. Sales of land to multiple buyers is widespread and land regulations remain weakly enforced, with “landguards” – members of organised criminal groups who use violence to protect land and property – still being widely used despite being officially prohibited.
With regards to economic development, the weak enforcement capabilities of state actors are apparent in the exploitative tendencies of powerful “market queens” in the city, and their impacts on the operations of informal household microenterprises (HMEs).
Informal settlements have continued to proliferate in Accra, with upgrading efforts proving slow, inconsistent and often limited to small pilot projects championed by donors. There is evidence of increased attention around the welfare of informal settlement residents in political debates and national policy discourses, with elites increasingly recognising such neighbourhoods as a key source of political support.
Housing deficits in Accra also remain substantial. Policy failures have led to private-dominated formal and informal housing developments, which largely exclude the city’s low-income residents. Successive governments also tend to abandon urban housing projects started by their predecessors. The undersupply of rental accommodation in low-income neighbourhoods provides an opportunity for most landlords to impose exorbitant charges, often requiring tenants to pay an excessive advance for rental accommodation – often covering two to three years.
Politics, planning and policy implementation
Many of Accra’s development challenges are compounded by problematic city–national relations. Frequent political transitions that occur in Ghana result in leadership changes at the city level and there are clear implications for long-term planning and policy implementation in Accra. City authorities lack both the capacity and autonomy to mobilise and utilise resources in ways that best respond to local priorities – partly because of weaknesses in fiscal decentralisation.
Meanwhile, city governance is fragmented among 25 autonomous local government areas (LGAs) that continue to operate in silos. This makes city-wide coordination efforts difficult and adversely affects the delivery of essential urban services that cut across municipal boundaries.
Addressing Accra’s development challenges
The research findings suggest that there are no easy solutions to Accra’s socioeconomic development challenges and that addressing these requires effective citizen mobilisation.
This raises the question of how best to nurture and sustain reform-minded multistakeholder coalitions around the city’s most critical development challenges. External actors can provide vital support in this area – not just in helping to nurture and strengthen formal reform coalitions, but also in identifying where informal coalitional efforts may exist and providing essential technical support.
In the absence of effective coalitions of urban reformers in Accra, short-term policy implementation will continue to hinder effective service provision in the city. Establishing and sustaining reform coalitions has the potential to build consensus among different powerful urban actors and ensure the continuity of reforms across different political regimes.
Header photo credit: Kofi Bhavnani / Unsplash. A busy street in Accra, Ghana.
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