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Support for the MFMI is a top priority expressed in a recent
request to the Cities Alliance from the Government of Ghana for
longer-term support from the Alliance and its members around
issues of upgrading of urban slums, financing critical urban
infrastructure, promoting local economic development and other
urban development issues.
At a 15 February 2008 press conference with representatives of
the Cities Alliance, the Deputy Minister for Local Government,
Rural Development and Environment, Mr. Maxwell Jumah, announced
that the Government is preparing a National Urban Development
and Growth Policy (NUDGP).
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“We may have to admit that, as a country, we have not
anticipated urbanization rightly,” Jumah said. The urban
development situation in Ghana “involves a mixture of
stand-alone policies and lack of coordination,” with many
projects designed and implemented to support sectoral
interventions, “often as appendages of donor partner
initiatives.”
The NUDGP is anticipated to promote the “right synergy necessary
for ensuring that urban development is pursued in a more
coordinated and effective way,” Jumah said. The intention is to
“ensure the convergence of the urban development efforts,
consolidate the processes of resource allocation and management,
and build capacities for urban planning and management.”
The Ghana urban policy and finance initiatives have been
developing over the past several years, supported in part by
Cities Alliance grants to help prepare the MFMI, and for the
first phase of a city development strategy for Kumasi, the
country’s second largest city. The Cities Alliance is also
providing funding through
UN-HABITAT’s Slum Upgrading
Facility for the
development of slum upgrading funds for Sekondi Takoradi
and for Tema. |
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From left to
right: Hon. Prof. George Gyan-Baffour, Deputy
Minister of Finance and Economic Planning; Mr.
Maxwell Jumah, Deputy Minister for Local Government,
Rural Development and Environment; and Kevin Milroy,
Deputy Programme Manager, Cities Alliance. |
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Urban development issues have also been a recent topic in the
Ghana press. “Current discussion on policy alternatives to
eliminate poverty in Ghana is lopsided,” wrote Dr. Olivia Frimpong Kwapong in a two-part essay,
"Urban Development and
Poverty Reduction – Some Institutional Issues," featured in the 5-6
February 2008 editions of the Ghanaian Times. “There is
an over-emphasis on the economic and financial issues related to
poverty reduction with scant attention to the institutional
issues that shape and drive the urban policy planning and
implementation processes.”
These institutional issues, Kwapong writes, include the
rural-urban nexus (urban and rural dwellers sink or swim
together in the fight against poverty), visioning, governance,
public education, information dissemination, and financing. “At
the top of needed policy direction,” Kwapong concludes, is a
genuine commitment to pro-poor policies, and engaging poor and
vulnerable segments of the population in the “process of
visioning, planning, and implementing policies in support of
urban development.”
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