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Decongest the Economy, Decongest Accra: A Tri-Pole Economy Model for Ghana
Recent developments in rainfall patterns have unearthed some realities about the fragility of Accra; the one city that lives in the minds of many Ghanaian youths who envisage building their best lives or lifting the fortunes of their entire households. As this dream of living in Accra crept into the hearts and minds of the vast majority of the youth, the lines between Accra, a small city of about 140 km2, and the Greater Accra region, a 3,245 km2 expanse, began to blur. And just like that, everybody, poor and rich alike, wanted a piece of Accra, or rather Greater Accra, albeit concentrated toward the former, the nation’s economic epicentre.
This gave rise to upscale neighbourhoods and slums alike, with little regard for the path of water — one of nature’s most brutal forces, which knows no bounds and will have its way, one way or another. Here we are today, where a less-than-24hour downpour of rain brought the economic engine to a standstill, leaving streets that are often choked with humans and vehicles either empty or submerged, and inhabitants in a state of emergency. Accra’s floods, traffic, and housing crisis are not primarily engineering failures. They are economic symptoms.
Accra’s congestion problem is an economic geography issue long before it became a pure engineering problem. This problem has resulted in recurring losses in productive hours, infrastructure repair and forgone investment, which overall impedes the nation’s progression. Ghana cannot simply engineer its way out of a fundamentally economic problem, at least not without steep, avoidable costs and public resistance. Tackling the root cause of the problem requires redistributing where opportunity is created.
Going by GSS’s most recent census figures, Greater Accra holds about 5.5 million people (18% of Ghana’s total population) on a land area of 3,245 km2, a density of
1,681 people/km2. That is roughly twelve times the national average density. A crude comparison puts this in perspective: Bangladesh, the densest large sovereign state in the world, averages about 1,500 people/km2. By extrapolation, if every region in Ghana were as dense as Greater Accra, the country’s population would be the size of the United States, packed onto a land area the size of the United Kingdom. The chart below shows just how lopsided this is: Greater Accra and Ashanti between them hold nearly two-fifths of Ghana’s population, yet Greater Accra squeezes its share onto by far the smaller of the two footprints.
