Working Paper 22 Accra: City report - Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai October 2024

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Table of Contents

• Executive summary 4
• 1. Introduction and overview 7
• Figure 2: ACRC’s conceptual framework 7
• Figure 1: Map showing the geographic location of Accra 7
• 2. Locating Accra within the national political settlement and governance structure 10
• 2.1. The nature of Ghana’s political settlement 11
• Power configuration 13
• Figure 3: Estimating Ghana’s national PS blocs (%) 14
• 2.2. Accra and the national political settlement 16
• Figure 5: Share of the urban–rural population by region, 2021 16
• Figure 6: Population distribution by district in GAMA, 2021 17
• Figure 7: NPP and NDC performance in presidential elections in Accra 19
• Figure 8: Share of NPP and NDC parliamentary seats in Accra 19
• 2.3. Locating Accra in Ghana’s governance structure 20
• Figure 9: Accra’s local governance structure 21
• Figure 10: Human resource capacity of MMDAs in GAMA, 2022 23
• 3. City-level power balance and governance 24
• 3.1. Everyday politics in the city 27
• 4. City of systems overview 29
• 4.1. Organisation, ownership and governance 29
• 4.2. Coverage, quality and access 31
• 4.3. History and record of contestation 32
• 4.4. Risks and vulnerabilities 34
• 5. Domain summaries 35
• 5.1. Structural transformation 35
• Figure 11: Shares of employment in each sector across years of establishment 36
• Figure 12: Shares of employment in each sector by district in the GAMA 37
• 5.2. Neighbourhood and district economic development (NDED) 40
• Figure 13: Popular locations of household microenterprises in GAMA 40
• 5.3. Land and connectivity 44
• Key actors in the land and connectivity domain 48
• 5.4. Housing domain 49
• 5.5. Informal settlements 53
• Reform efforts in informal settlements 56
• 6. Political economy of development in Accra 58
• 6.1. Collusive city–national relations 58
• 6.2. Institutional duplicity and weak coordination 60
• 6.3. Politics and the challenge of financing 61
• 6.4. The challenge of policy and programme continuities 62
• 6.5. Ethnic politics and the intractable challenge of land acquisition 63
• 7. Implications for reform and theory 65
• 7.1. Prospects for reforms 65
• 7.2. Implications for ACRC’s conceptual framework 68
• The value of politically informed analysis of city systems 68
• The limits of top-down urban reform approaches in broad-dispersed political settlements 68
• Development progress in broad-dispersed political settlements 69
• References 71