Urban governance and sustainable development expert, Farouk Braimah, has criticised Ghana’s failure to adopt a clear, coordinated national strategy to address the country’s growing slum crisis, despite years of political pledges and scattered interventions.
Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show with Bernard Avle on Tuesday, July 1, Mr. Braimah noted that Ghana continues to grapple with the challenge of informal settlements due to the absence of a concrete slum development or prevention policy.
His remarks follow the release of a new Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) report, Slum and Informal Settlements in Ghana, which revealed that 30.8% of the country’s urban population—about 4.8 million people—live in slums. This figure surpasses the global average of 24.7%, though it remains below the Sub-Saharan African average of 53.9%.
“One of the key points I want to raise, even though it is getting better, is that we do not have any planned policy,” Braimah stated.
“As a country, we’ve been battling issues of urban poverty since the late ’90s and early 2000s, but we still do not have an operational slum plan or policy that guides government interventions.”
He acknowledged that the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Ministry of Local Government had previously developed a draft national slum prevention policy. However, he lamented its lack of implementation.
“I think that document must be given some oxygen to be implemented at the district level,” he stressed.
Mr. Braimah also blamed poor investment planning and fragmented institutional responsibilities for the deepening crisis.
“As a country, we’ve not invested in key areas in a coordinated way. Issues of drainage, transport, sanitation, and housing are all interconnected. When efforts are compartmentalised, the impact is lost,” he noted.
He further argued that spatial plans created by many city authorities fall short of real infrastructure transformation due to the absence of actionable, physical designs.
“This again tells you that our local government system is not functioning as it should,” he said.
Mr. Braimah called for immediate cross-sector collaboration and the empowerment of local authorities to implement comprehensive, long-term solutions to slum development.
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