By Ghana News
Copyright ghanamma
Founder and Fellow of the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Dr. Hene Aku Kwapong, has emphasised the need to accelerate Ghana’s development through effective decentralisation.
Speaking in an interview with Bernard Avle on Channel One TV’s The Point of View on Monday, September 15, Dr. Kwapong said Ghana must rethink how communities are defined and organised to ensure balanced growth.
“There’s a sense that people think that we have decentralisation because somehow they have other communities functioning. But if I ask you what a village in Ghana is, how would you define it? I don’t know, you probably don’t know, I don’t know what a town is in Ghana.
“We can point to several towns, but we can point to a city, one that doesn’t have a mayor, one that does. What are the things we have not defined? What are the minimum amenities that a village should have?” he asked.
According to him, the absence of clarity on what constitutes a village, town, or city undermines spatial organisation and development planning. He stressed the need for minimum amenities to be defined for each type of community to allow citizens to build their lives around them.
“We have to make every citizen build their lives in these communities. By connecting villages to towns and towns to cities. That is how we connect the whole country together and make sure it works. We need clarity on [spatial organisation],” he said.
Using Accra as an example, Dr. Kwapong argued that the city’s congestion is not due to overpopulation but poor organisation. He said many people mistakenly assume that districts automatically cater for towns and villages, whereas in other countries, districts function primarily as organising units for effective governance and planning.
“Accra is crowded not because there are too many people, but because it has not been organised in a way that we all have clarity for it to work. One of the challenges we all have is that we somehow all assume that the district takes care of towns and villages. In most countries, the district is actually an organising unit.”
