Urbanization, Legacies of Elite Capture, and Multi-Dimensional Exclusions in Ghana: Towards Just Housing and Neighborhood Policies in African Cities

Abstract

Persisting housing challenges in Africa’s cities are often theorized as driven by rapid demographic expansion outstripping housing supply or by the urbanization of poverty which puts the cost of adequate and serviced housing beyond the reach of many urban dwellers. This theorization links the problem of inadequate supply and low quality of housing to ahistorical, apolitical factors such as the size and income/poverty characteristics of Africa’s urban population and ignores legacies of elite capture and multi-dimensional exclusions reflected in policies and practices. Yet these policies and practices shape urban governance and who gains access to land, housing finance and ultimately serviced housing and neighborhoods. Drawing on a review of policies, media sources and literature on housing in Ghana and taking a critical postcolonial institutional theoretic approach, we argue that a more complete conceptualization of Africa’s urban housing crises should involve a close look at the regressive historical patterns of urban investments and persisting elite biases in institutions managing land, finance and housing. This re-framing of housing problems creates a more holistic framework and better articulates the unjust foundations of regressive and exclusionary policies and practices. Further, it highlights elite capture and multi-dimensional exclusions that perpetuate current housing and service failure in African cities. An explicit focus on power, exclusion and injustice is necessary to formulate and advocate alternative policies that are more likely to produce inclusive livable housing and neighborhoods. These include moratoriums on evictions, expanded slum upgrading, progressive property and land taxation, more inclusive planning systems, better regulation of rental housing and improved delivery of land and finance for transit oriented affordable public and rental housing.

Introduction

In 2020, 51.3% of Africa’s urban population, some 218 million people (UN-Habitat 2020), lived in slums and as cities on the continent continue to grow, a very large and rapid expansion in housing provision is needed. How this will happen remains unclear. What is evident, however, is that current approaches are not working adequately to address this critical shortage of affordable and livable housing and hence, the underlying ideas informing housing policies need re-thinking. In this paper, we urge a rethink of the view widely held among scholars and development practitioners that urbanization is driving the urban housing crises on the continent (Saunders, 2012; Turok & Borel-Saladin, 2018; UN-Habitat, 2003; World Bank, 2009). The persistence of slums and affordable housing challenges generally in Africa’s cities is most often approached as an urbanization-related phenomenon driven by a rising gap between housing supply and urban population growth, and by urbanization of poverty which puts the cost of adequate and serviced housing beyond the reach of many urban dwellers (Berner, 2007; Nyametso, 2012; World Bank, 2015a, 2015b). These two, reinforcing urbanization-driven processes are seen to force individuals and households to use informal means to access housing with repercussions for the persistence and expansion of slums, especially in large cities and towns (Saunders, 2012; Turok & Borel-Saladin, 2018; UN-Habitat, 2003; World Bank, 2009).

We argue that, as important as rapid demographic expansion and urbanization of poverty are, the urbanization-heavy approach to Africa’s housing crises elides questions of power and resource distribution and hence needs unpacking. The approach frames Africa’s urban housing questions a-historically and a-politically, foreclosing avenues for considering how the processes, policies, institutional dynamics, and the historical peculiarities dictating unequal access to and the distribution of land, housing finance, housing and urban investments and opportunities generally also contribute to unjust housing outcomes. In this sense, we critique the urbanization-heavy approach as a kind of an ‘anti-politics machine’ explanation (Ferguson, 1994) that overlooks the patterns of inequitable policies that shape Africa’s urban housing systems to “work” for some, while failing the majority.

We draw on a review of Ghana’s housing policies and practices and the increasingly rich research and grey literature around them to advance a historical-institutional critique of the urbanization-heavy approach to housing in Africa’s cities. Ghana, with its severe housing problems, is a good lens from which to explore the dynamics of broader African housing crises and argue for a more holistic framework, drawing on insights from critical postcolonial institutional theory. This framework focuses on the extent to which elite capture–a consistent historical pattern of the advantaged minority steering state and non-state resources and institutions to their own narrow benefits and aims–has produced multi-dimensional exclusions–and hence persisting injustices that must be more directly understood and tackled through new policy frameworks in order to move towards just housing and neighborhoods.

For most of Ghana’s colonial experience (which began in 1874), the government did not directly involve itself in the housing needs of the general indigenous population. The schemes it introduced catered for the needs of Europeans and a few indigenous government officials. Some serviced urban plots were also leased to the indigenous people, but only the affluent class benefited from the intervention. Thus, there was no emphasis on affordable housing during the colonial era with the result that colonial housing policies largely benefited a privileged minority (Azunre et al., 2021; Boamah, 2010; Boateng, 2022b). The resulting housing injustices and crisis faced by most of the urban population was noted in the Aiken Watson Commission report as one of the underlying causes of the 28th February 1948 Riot that occurred in Accra and its surrounding communities (Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 2016).

After independence in 1957, successive post-colonial governments became more involved in housing by directly constructing houses, offering loans to workers to build their own houses and subsidies to state agencies to build houses for the public (Government of Ghana, 2015). The focus, however, was largely on those employed by the state, a relatively privileged minority (Arku, 2009; Boamah, 2010). Thus, ‘post-colonial’ housing policies remained ‘postcolonial’, retaining the exclusionary and discriminatory features of the colonial ones. In the 1980s, when Ghana signed onto the IMF/World Bank’s market-heavy Economic Recovery Program, popularly known as structural adjustment reform, the state rolled back from even this limited amount of housing delivery (Arku, 2009; Konadu-Agyemang, 2001a, 2001b). Strategies for dealing with the acute shortage faltered; in 1986 a draft National Housing Policy began but stalled, most likely because it required a mandatory state contribution to a National Housing Fund as well as taxing imported building materials (UN-Habitat, 2011). Again in 1992, a National Shelter Strategy was started–but also remained incomplete because of lack of political support (UN-Habitat, 2011).

It was only in 2015 when the Ministry of Water Resource, Housing and Public Works released a National Housing Policy aimed at creating an enabling framework to address the problem (Government of Ghana, 2015). The policy mentions a draft Slum Upgrading and Prevention Strategy (2013) but other than this mention and some reference to it in the media (Ghanaweb, 2022a) this draft strategy appears moribund. The result of this faltering and fragmented approach to housing is that declared intentions on housing by successive governments have largely remained scattered in budgets, party manifestos, and national development frameworks but not clearly and overtly articulated (Government of Ghana, 2015; Obeng-Odoom, 2013).

Ghana’s 2015 National Housing Policy boasts of having its foundation in international frameworks such as Article 25 (1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948; Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1966 and the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless in 1987 (Government of Ghana, 2015: 4–5). The document makes claims about equity, social and affordable housing (Government of Ghana, 2015: 12; 14; 22; 24; 29; 34 and 36) and prioritizing and protecting the needs of vulnerable groups in housing, land distribution and urban planning generally (Government of Ghana, 2015: 12; 17; 22 and 24). In practice–however–as will be shown shortly–these values barely reflect the kind of housing outcomes and urban governance practices that have tended to play out in the country over its history and remain entrenched. The current National Housing Policy and the values such as equity, inclusivity, social and affordable housing expressed in it are a step forward but must be evaluated in relation to the current situation and practices.

The Ghana Statistical Service claims that the housing deficit in the country has been declining over the years–from 2.8 million in 2010 to 1.8 million in 2021 (Ghanaian Nyabor, 2022; Times, 2022). Overall, however, many people continue to experience impeded access to adequately serviced and affordable housing in the country (Okyere et al., 2018a, 2018b; Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), 2012; 2021a; 2021b), especially in the urban areas where the population continues to grow–from 12,545,229 (50.9%) in 2010 to 17,472,530 (56.7%) in 2021 (Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), 2021a: 28). The housing challenge in cities manifests in diverse ways including the increasing use of unconventional structures such as kiosks, containers and tents as housing by vendors and entire communities living in similar decrepit insecure structures in poorly serviced areas (Klopp & Paller, 2019; Okyere et al., 2018a, 2018b; Paller, 2014). The proportion of kiosks/containers used as accommodation in metropolitan areas grew from 44.5% in 2000 to 62% in 2010 (Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), 2012). The 2021 Population and Housing Census report suggests that 6 out of every 10 of the 10.7 million structures in Ghana are used for residential purposes, some 20% of them are containers, kiosks, and wooden structures (Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), 2021b).

Ghana’s urban housing challenge is often approached as emerging from demographic expansion outstripping housing supply and urbanization of poverty (Government of Ghana, 2015; Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), 2014: ix), which makes the country the appropriate setting to scrutinize the urbanization-heavy approach to housing crisis in Africa’s cities. It is also an interesting reference point to explore the urbanization-heavy approach as an ‘anti-politics machine’ explanation because such abstract narratives, as we will show in due course, obscure both successful elite capture of housing policies and the political economy barriers undermining lower class urban dwellers’ chances of enjoying decent urban accommodation and neighborhoods in the country.

After this overview, the rest of the paper flows as follows: Sect. "Materials and theory" presents the materials and theory the study relies upon. Sect. "Urbanization and Africa’s slum/housing crisis: View from Ghana" considers and critiques the apolitical/ahistorical urbanization-heavy approach to Africa’s urban housing crisis and its application to Ghana. This is followed by Sect. "Ghana’s urban housing crisis: A critical postcolonial institutional grounding" which presents a critical postcolonial explanation that highlights the array of specific policies, institutional dynamics, and historical peculiarities underlying the persisting housing and service failure in Ghana’s cities. Sect. "Discussion and conclusions" discusses key highlights and concludes the paper with some housing and neighborhoods policy recommendations that center justice and equity.

Materials and Theory

This study draws on materials from three secondary sources: media, scholarly and institutional/policy sources. The media materials were assembled with keyword searches including ‘housing crisis in Ghana’; ‘Ghana’s urban housing inequalities’; ‘slums/informal housing/settlements in Ghana’ and ‘housing deficits in Ghana’ on Google and in the search engines or databases of reputable Ghanaian news agencies including the Ghanaian Times, Graphic Online, and Ghanaweb. Media sources have been endorsed in the Ghanaian (Boateng, 2021a; Mintah et al., 2021; Obeng-Odoom, 2011, 2022) and broader African scholarly community (see e.g., Boateng (2016); Boateng & Wright, 2019; Yahya, 2006) as useful for investigating dynamic development issues in the country and the continent.

The likelihood of bias reporting, however, requires researchers relying on such sources to consider a variety of media agencies to have a balanced picture. Consequently, information was sourced from local private (e.g., Ghanaweb, 2021) and state-owned (e.g., Smith-Asante, 2018; Ghanaian Times, 2022) as well as international media organizations (e.g., Harrisberg, 2019; Bloomberg Tax, 2021). The keywords used to assemble the media materials were similar to those used in gathering the scholarly materials save that most of the scholarly materials were gathered using Google Scholar; Web of Science, JSTOR, and ProQuest. Many of these search engines do not adequately capture African scholarship (see Obeng-Odoom, 2019), so after reviewing the initial materials for relevance, purposive techniques and the snowball sampling technique were applied to search and incorporate relevant excluded references. This aided in expanding the scope of the materials search.

As with other African countries (Saunders, 2012; Turok & Borel-Saladin, 2018; UN-Habitat, 2003; World Bank, 2009), the conversations on the persistence and expansion of slums in Ghana often focus on the situations of large cities and towns. Therefore, most of the media and scholarly materials the study relies upon reflect the conditions in such primate and other similarly sized cities particularly Accra, Tema and Kumasi. Nonetheless, we also draw on materials on the situations of other similarly important mid-size cities that often do not feature in the discourses (see e.g., Boamah, 2010). Further, national reports, policies and agendas are critical in shaping local government and action in cities along with global and private sector (property developer) influence. Therefore, taking a multi-scalar, power-mapping approach, we incorporate documents and reports from local private property developer associations (e.g., GREDA, (n.d.)); national institutions (e.g., Ministry of Water Resource, Housing and Public Works (Government of Ghana, 2015) and international bodies (e.g., Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (CAHF) (2020); World Bank (2015a)).

The paper’s focus on shedding light on the deep historical-institutional influences on housing outcomes in contemporary Ghanaian cities requires an analytical framework that considers present-day developments in relation to the past. This made critical postcolonial institutional theory (CPIT) appropriate. The CPIT is a body of studies that approaches the conditions in societies facing late colonialism in the context of the historical, global and national power structures that continue to mold their systems (Amin 1972; 2002; Njoh, 1997; 2010 in Obeng-Odoom, 2016a; Boateng, 2021b). The original contribution of CPIT to the study of problems of such societies lies in its capacity to support sustained discursive and systematic analyses that link present conditions to, not just historical experience, but also to various local and external factors produced by that historical experience that continue to have present day influence (Boateng, 2020a, 2021b; Obeng-Odoom, 2016a).

This framework helps explain the continued patterns of elite capture and multi-dimensional exclusion in Ghanaian housing policy, despite a prevailing international development discourse around rights, inclusion and equity in housing (UN-Habitat, 2014; Wilson, 2020), and a National Housing Policy (Government of Ghana, 2015). A just housing policy in Ghana and other similarly situated African countries would involve dismantling these regressive elements of current approaches to housing and urban governance. This makes it extremely important to understand the specific ways that power and persisting institutional dynamics around housing policies and practices operate to produce and reproduce deep inequalities.

Urbanization and Africa’s Slum/Housing Crisis: View from Ghana

According to UN-Habitat (2008), the concept of a ‘slum’ refers to any urban area suffering from one or more of the following conditions: non-durable structures (e.g., shacks), insufficient living area (i.e., overcrowding), deficient access to adequate water facilities, or deficient access to adequate sanitation facilities although in practice slums can be hard to define precisely (Engstrom et al., 2019). In Africa, many slums tend to be concentrated in the inner-city, mostly in the sprawling impoverished communities that run in and around the more built-up central business and industrial districts of towns and cities, in other words near employment opportunities, or on the peripheries of cities on cheaper and more marginal lands (Klopp & Paller, 2019; Takyi et al., 2020).

Broadly, the persistence and expansion of slums in Africa’s cities and the overall lack of quality, affordable housing in serviced neighborhoods generally on the continent is often attributed to two urbanization-driven processes: the first is demographic and the second economic. The demographic explanation attributes the problem to the rising gap between housing supply and rapid urban population growth (Nyametso, 2012; Berner, 2007; Obudho & Mhlanga 1988; World Bank, 2015a, 2015b). Malpezzi and Sa-Aadu (1996), for instance, argues that ‘the rate of African urbanization is the raison d’etre for squatter settlements’ (p. 151). Similarly, Tibaijuka (2007: 8) noted that ‘in most African countries, a wide gap exists between housing needs and housing supply’. One World Bank report makes similar claims arguing that ‘in Sub-Saharan Africa, urbanization is not accompanied by the level of housing investment that is observed elsewhere in global trends’ (World Bank, 2015a: 1). The main message of the demographic approach is that slums persist and expand in Africa because the continent’s rate of urban population growth exceeds housing supply. In this demographic interpretation, the persistence of slums in Africa is due to ‘excessive demand’ for housing.

If the demographic approach focuses on the size of Africa’s urban population, the economic approach focuses on its socio-economic or poverty/income characteristics (Arimah, 2010; Arimah et al., 2011; Glaeser, 2011; Marx et al., 2013; Payne, 2005; Saunders, 2012; Turner, 1968, 1969). According to the economic view, slums occur and grow because of urban poverty–the so-called urbanization of poverty or urbanization without development in Africa. Arimah et al., 2011: 17) captures this view as follows: ‘The pernicious effect of urbanization on the incidence of slums is indicative of the process of urbanization without development or limited development’. Marx et al., (2013: 190) put it more directly, by diagnosing ‘slums as poverty trap’. The underlying logic here is that income, ultimately, determines ‘effective demand’—i.e., the quality of housing people could build, buy, or rent (Fox, 2014). The problem, however, is that most urban dwellers in Africa are in the low-income strata (Klopp & Paller, 2019; Barne and Wadhwa, 2018). The high concentration of poverty in cities in Africa is seen to limit the quantity of resources in the hands of consumers to pay for better houses, upgrading, and maintaining existing ones or rental housing that meets normative international standards (Turok & Borel-Saladin, 2018; World Bank, 2009).

Overall, Africa’s urban housing crisis is most often approached using abstract market dynamics of supply and demand connected to population growth (supply problems) and the concentration of poverty in urban areas (demand problems). These two urbanization-driven processes are perceived to force individuals and households to pursue their housing needs through officially unapproved means leading to the development of slums, especially in large cities and towns. Thus, UN-Habitat (2003: vi), for instance, argues that ‘slums are a manifestation of …. rapid urbanization and urbanization of poverty’.

This abstract market and urbanization-focussed approach to slums or urban housing crisis generally is widely emphasized in Ghana’s scholarly and policy circles (Amoako & Cobbinah, 2011; Cobbinah et al., 2015a, 2015b; Nyametso, 2012; Okyere et al., 2018a, 2018b). The Ghana Statistical Service aptly captures this approach to slum policy and research as follows:

In broad terms, the housing question is largely a case of housing demand outstripping supply and/or the price of housing being over and above the wage of the average worker. In both or either situation, individuals and households resort to officially unapproved means to secure housing leading to the development of slums, especially in large cities and towns (GSS, 2014a: ix).

Although most Ghanaians live in urban areas, only a little over 40% of the housing stock in the country is in such areas (see Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), 2012). Also, the standard of living for most Ghanaians is quite low. The Ghana Statistical Service reported in a recent living standards’ survey that population growth has outstripped reduction of overall poverty incidence, resulting in far more Ghanaians becoming poor (see Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), 2018: x). More importantly, the house price/income ratio in Ghana’s cities is high (Obeng-Odoom, 2013). Out of twenty-six cities for which the UN-Habitat had data in 2003, only five (Abidjan, Tanta, Monrovia, Maputo and Jinja) had a higher house price/income ratio than Ghana’s capital, Accra (see Obeng-Odoom, 2013: 111). The Business Insider Africa recently ranked Ghana as the most expensive African country to rent a one-bedroom apartment (Benson, 2022). This context gives some impetus to the claim that Ghana’s urban housing challenge is simply the result of rapid demographic expansion outstripping housing supply or the urbanization of poverty putting the cost of adequate and serviced housing beyond the reach of many urban dwellers.

As self-evident as it may seem, however, this view of the urban housing challenge is problematic for many reasons. First, approaching the issue a-historically and apolitically as simply being driven by abstract market and urbanization processes ignores how the power structures and institutions dictating access to and the distribution of land, housing finance, housing and urban investments also contribute to housing outcomes. Thus, the urbanization-heavy view does not adequately consider the influence of power relations on housing outcomes. This speaks to the growing call for a change in studying Africa’s urban questions only superficially in terms of population size and characteristics to focus more on the processes, policies, institutional dynamics, and the historical peculiarities underlying specific urban conditions/problems (Azunre et al., 2021; Boateng, 2019, 2021b; Cobbinah et al., 2016; Obeng-Odoom, 2010a, 2016b).

These critiques call for enhanced explanations that seriously consider power relations in their diagnosis of Ghana’s urban housing challenges. Refreshingly, a body of studies exists on the political processes, policies, institutional dynamics, and the historical peculiarities shaping access and the distribution of land (see e.g., Obeng-Odoom, 2016b; Gillespie, 2018, 2020; Owusu, 2008, 2012) housing finance and housing (see e.g., Arku, 2006, 2009; Grant, 2009; Grant & Yankson, 2003); rental exploitation (Arku et al., 2012; Owusu-Ansah et al., 2018); urban governance (Bob-Millar & Obeng-Odoom, 20112011; Obeng-Odoom, 2013; Owusu, 2010) and public investments generally in Ghana (Klopp & Paller, 2019; Songsore, 1979, 2008, 2009). The rest of the paper draws on this work to provide a more holistic, critical postcolonial institutional lens to re-conceptualize Ghana’s urban housing issues in terms of exclusion, repression and power.

Ghana’s Urban Housing Crisis: A Critical Postcolonial Institutional Grounding

The historical-institutional drivers of urban housing and service failure in Ghana are many and complex. Nonetheless, a review of them with a critical postcolonial institutional lens yields 6 broad intricately connected factors as central to understanding the problem. These are 1) inequitable and exclusionary housing policies; 2) exclusionary mortgage finance; 3) misallocation of lands to support the housing needs of a privileged few and pervasive land conflicts; 4) continuing disinvestment in low-cost local building inputs and technology; 5) rent exploitation; and 6) forced evictions and related political violence. While we will explore each of these factors separately at first, they are in fact intricately related and interact in ways that align land access, housing finance and housing and urban investments generally in favor of the needs of a more powerful minority and work against lower class urban dwellers’ chances of enjoying decent accommodation and neighborhoods.

Inequitable and Discriminatory Housing Policies

Housing policies in Ghana tend to benefit the high income and upper middle class, and exclude the majority low-income population (Addo and Mba, 2021; Arku, 2009; Obeng-Odoom, 2013, 2015). This inequitable and discriminatory framework of housing delivery, as shown in the introduction, has roots in the country’s colonial experience (Arku, 2009; Azunre et al., 2021; Boateng, 2019). Nevertheless, many scholars agree that it has become more pronounced since Ghana adopted a market-based approach to housing in the 1980s as part of the structural adjustment reforms funded by the IMF and the World Bank (Arku, 2009; Gillespie, 2016, 2018, 2020; Grant, 2009).

Although 80–90% of Ghana’s housing output is delivered by informal providers, comprising self-builders and small-scale enterprises who also target the lower income and poor class (Arku, 2009; Boamah, 2010; Boateng, 2020b; UN-Habitat, 2011), structural adjustment reforms privileged the needs of formal private real estate companies targeting people with higher incomes. For instance, the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre lobbied the Government of Ghana to offer incentives such as allowing foreigners to own properties in Ghana (Grant, 2007; Ehwi, 2020). The policy benefits private real estate companies because most foreigners in the country patronize houses built by such companies (Boateng, 2019; Ehwi, 2020). The Government also introduced a 5-year tax holiday scheme for real estate companies and reduced corporate tax (from 55 to 45%) and import tariffs on some heavy-duty construction equipment and building materials (Konadu-Agyemang, 2001b; Obeng-Odoom, 2013).

Both the foreign and locally owned real estate companies operating in Ghana continue to adopt ‘affordable housing’ rhetoric to enjoy these major tax breaks. They also enjoy other soft resources including public presidential inaugurations of new developments and preferential treatment from traditional authorities and government officials in the form of flexible payment arrangements for customary lands and expeditious approval of land titles, building permits and other similar applications (Ehwi, 2020; Fält, 2019). In reality, however, the price of the houses these companies produce are dollar-denominated and prohibitively expensive for most Ghanaians–typically ranging from US$30,000 to US$2,000,000 (Arku, 2006; Asante et al., 2018). Income levels in Ghana are low. Minimum wage sits just a little over $1 an hour (see Bloomberg Tax, 2021) and with most of the population trapped in insecure low-income informal jobs (Awaworyi and Danquah 2020; Ehwi et al., 2021; Morrison et al., 2021), the number of minimum wage earners is relatively small. Even those with higher educational attainments, including graduates, face financial hardships evidenced by the incessant demonstrations, strikes and other industrial actions for better working conditions in the country (Asante et al., 2021).

The combined result of these dynamics is that most of the population has been excluded from the formal private real estate market. Although private sector-led housing is highly emphasized in Ghana, the state often makes some attempts to provide some form of public housing. The problem, however, is that such projects are frequently abandoned. For instance, in 2006, the Kufuor-led NPP Government initiated the construction of some 100,000 affordable homes across the country worth US$436 million. The Ata Mills NDC Government that defeated the NPP in the 2008 elections refused to complete the project (Akwei et al., 2020). Similarly, media reports suggest that the Saglemi affordable housing projects initiated in 2012 by the Mahama NDC Government have been abandoned by the Akufo-Addo NPP Government (Annan, 2019).

Problems such as corruption, petty partisan politics, and collective choice failures play key roles in the non-completion or abandonment of public housing projects in Ghana (Akwei et al., 2020; Williams, 2017). However, echoing colonial patterns, such state-led housing projects often target public officials and other classes of people with stable sources of formal income (Ministry of Works and Housing. (n.d).; Ghanaweb, 2021). The result of this is that the few state-led housing programs that are completed do not benefit lower-and middle-income informal workers who constitute the majority. Together, these patterns suggest an overall bias in housing delivery policies towards the needs of a privileged few. But these are not the only housing-related exclusions that lower class urban dwellers face in Ghana. There are others. The next subsection turns to one of them: mortgage finance.

Exclusionary Mortgage Financing

Mortgage financing–one of the important tools being used to expand access to adequate serviced housing in many developed countries (Freedman, 2004; Teye et al., 2015)–has been in Ghana since the colonial and early post-colonial periods. Such interventions include the establishment of the First Ghana Building Society in 1956 to encourage savings for home purchase; the Bank for Housing and Construction in 1974 to provide loans for housing, industrial construction, and building materials production, and the Home Finance Company in 1990 with funds from the World Bank and the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (Arku, 2009; Quansah & Debrah, 2015). Despite this long history with mortgage finance, Ghana has not been able to systematically develop financial institutions to support the pursuit and the provision of housing needs in any meaningful way. This is evidenced by just 0.8% of households in the country being able to use mortgage financing to build their houses (Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (CAHF), 2020). Mortgage to GDP ratio in Ghana has been stuck at 0.5% over the years (Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (CAHF), 2020), way below the African average of 15.7% (Teye et al., 2015). An understanding of why Ghana has not been able to leverage mortgage finance to expand access to adequately serviced affordable housing requires a careful consideration of one of the key foregrounds of critical postcolonial institutional theory: the continuing influence of the intersecting interplay of inherited policies, externally financed programs and ideologies and local dynamics of development in societies facing late colonialism.

Ghana’s political elites tend to make some gestures towards using the constitutional state to deliver public goods and services. Overall, however, their posture (Amoah, 2021; New Patriotic Party Manifesto 2020; National Democratic Congress (NDC) 2020) heavily aligns with the neoliberal idea that ‘markets work better for poor people’ (World Bank, 2001: 1). They have, therefore, increasingly sought to ‘roll back the state’ resulting in inadequate prioritization of investing in public sector employment, with the hope that the private formal sector will grow and absorb the growing population of desperate unemployed and underemployed people in the country. This market-heavy ideology behind the socio-political-economic organization of the Ghanaian society has roots in the structural adjustment reforms implemented in the country to satisfy the World Bank/IMF aid conditions.

Several years after structural adjustment, however, only 12.6% of the population are employed by the formal private sector (Ghana Statistical Service. (GSS), 2021c: 130). As a result, the informal sector has continued to blossom, employing some 80% of the total labor force (Awaworyi and Danquah 2020). Informal jobs, however, do not come with appointment letters/employment contracts, wage statements, income tax returns, credit reports and the other critical documents on which banks and financial institutions rely to honor mortgage applications (Boamah, 2009, 2014; Karley, 2002; Teye et al., 2015), excluding most workers from the mortgage finance market. Informality is not the only pathway through which the continuing impacts of inherited policies and externally financed programs and ideologies are undermining Ghana’s efforts towards leveraging mortgage finance to expand access to housing. There is also the issue of land titling.

The post-colonial Ghanaian State, with support from international financial institutions (Ministry of Lands and Forestry, 1999, 2003; World Bank, 2003 in Mintah et al., 2021) and the local courts (Boateng (No. 2) v. Manu (No. 2) & another [2008] SCGLR: 1119 in Mintah et al., 2021), have entrenched the colonial legacy of land titling as the only valid proof of land ownership in the country (PNDC Law 152, 1986, 18(1); Mintah et al., 2021). As a result, the banks and other financial institutions do not accept any other documentation for mortgage financing (Boamah, 2014; Teye et al., 2015).

Meanwhile, the processes for acquiring property titles in Ghana remain cumbersome, costly and corruption-laden which once again favors wealthier and more powerful actors (Mintah et al., 2021; Mintah and Boateng, 2021a, 2021b). More problematically, the documents offer extremely limited protections–dispossession of ‘titled properties’ through illegitimate force and other similar means is commonplace in Ghana (Darkwa & Attuquayefio, 2012; Mintah et al., 2021; Mintah and Boateng, 2021a, 2021b). There is, therefore, high public reticence towards property rights formalization. This has resulted in the widespread practice of developing properties on untitled lands often with the service of uncertified constructors in poorly serviced neighborhoods.

Civil society organizations like the Ghana Federation of the Urban Poor have shown that the residents of such neighborhoods are often resourceful and can contribute critical resources to support building sustainable cities (Farouk & Owusu, 2012). Yet, the Ghanaian authorities seldom leverage resources in such communities including their potential to build missing important socio-economic databases (Farouk & Owusu, 2012) to facilitate spatial servicing and public service extension and uplift the standards of the low-cost housing in the neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Ghana’s mortgage service providers, unsurprisingly, put premium on titled properties constructed in well-serviced economically viable locations by certified or formal built environment professionals (Boamah, 2014; Teye et al., 2015; Obeng-Odoom, 2013; Arku, 2009). The result of this is that millions of properties in the country are excluded from mortgage financing, which, in turn, stimulates the use of informal funding sources–such as long-term savings or sweat equity (usually pension funds), informal loans and/or remittances from family members–for personal and commercial housing projects (Boamah, 2010; Obeng-Odoom, 2013).

Accumulating enough funds from these unstable informal sources to finance housing projects, however, takes a long time, with the result that houses are built piecemeal and incrementally–as and when some funds are ready (Afram et al., 2015; Asante et al., 2018; Boateng, 2019). Many of such projects are often abandoned before completion (Fobiri et al., 2017; Ghana Statistical Service, 2021b). The recently concluded 2021 Population and Housing Census report issued by the Ghana Statistical Service suggest that one in five structures in the country (the majority of which are for residential purposes) are uncompleted (Ghana Statistical Service, 2021b: 11). Those that are completed often take excessively long time: between 5–15 years or more (Afram et al., 2015; Asante et al., 2018; Boateng, 2019). This undermines expeditious mass production of quality affordable housing and enables the growth and expansion of slums in the country.

Misallocation of Lands to Support Housing Needs of a Privileged Few and Land Conflicts

Researchers including Agyemang and Morrison (2018), Ehwi (2020) and Fält, (2019) provide evidence that Ghanaian chiefs, priests, elders and other traditional authorities prefer to sell the customary lands under their care to profit-oriented private real estate companies to develop exclusive, high-security residential or gated communities (Grant, 2009) instead of releasing the lands to address the persisting housing challenges in the communities in whose ‘trust’ they hold the lands. Property rates in Ghana fall on buildings not on land per se (see Sect. 96(7) of the Local Government Act 1993 (Act 462); Obeng-Odoom, 2010b) with the result that revenues accruing from the widespread sale of customary lands for high-end projects go untaxed.

However, it is not just customary lands that are allocated to support the housing needs of a privileged few. The public lands (about 20% of all lands in the country–Obeng-Odoom, 2013) ‘vested in the Government of Ghana on behalf of, and in trust for, the people’ (Constitution, 1992: Article 257(2) too are distributed in a similar manner. For instance, in addition to using their positions in the state to allocate public lands to themselves and their cronies (Ehwi, 2020; Ghanaweb, 2022b), echoing the traditional leaders, state elites too frequently release public lands at below market rates to private real estate companies that also receive tax breaks and other incentives to develop high-end projects (Ehwi, 2020; Gillespie, 2016, 2018). Gillespie (2021) estimates that over 300 acres (about 120 hectares) of state-owned land in Ghana have been privatized at below market rates and redeveloped for such purposes since the 1990s. Recent media reports suggest that the Government of Ghana has sold some prime state lands that, per the valuation of the Ghana Institute of Surveyors, should have cost some US$139 m to a private real estate company, with alleged deep ties to the President’s family, at US$85 m (The Herald, 2023).

The paradoxical outcome of this tendency to allocate ‘communally owned’ traditional and state lands for the private gain of a privileged few is that Ghana’s urban poor, as Grant (2009: 64) rightly noted, are facing ‘a huge scarcity of affordable houses in the midst of a real estate boom’. Considering that the houses are subsidized through tax incentives and are built on public lands privatized below market rates, it could be argued that these policies and practices raise deep social injustice concerns as they transfer wealth from the general populace to the high net worth local and transnational clients of the private real estate companies who patronize such houses. Given the poor investment in industrial development or infrastructure, the houses have become a vehicle for local investment and speculation leading to excess high-end housing (Smith-Asante, 2018) as we also see in other African cities (Goodfellow, 2017, 2018, Mahama and Antwi, 2006). This speculation feeds into another important impediment to the provision of adequate, serviced and affordable housing in Ghana’s cities: land conflicts.

Ghana’s urban land market is highly disorderly, marked by intractable conflicts (Ehwi, 2020; Mintah et al., 2021). As with the persisting exclusionary housing framework and the informal structure of the economy undermining access to mortgage finance, present-day land conflicts in urban Ghana have roots in colonial policies, including the indirect rule system that allowed the colonial government and local chiefs to manipulate, corrupt and re-write customary land tenure laws to benefit themselves (Abdulai & Ochieng, 2012; Amanor, 2008; Blocher, 2006 in Ehwi, 2020). Nonetheless, the continuing effects of the capitalist structural adjustment of Ghanaian society to facilitate private capital accumulation have deepened the conflicts in new forms. Thus, as more and more real estate companies entered the housing market after the liberalization of Ghana’s economy and the housing sector, land values began to skyrocket and speculation on the property market became a common practice¹ (Arku, 2009; Grant, 2007; Konadu-Agyemang, 2001a). For instance, according to Konadu-Agyemang (2001a) the price for urban building plots increased by more than 1000% in the 1980s and 1990s.

These dynamics, which were particularly apparent in Accra, Tema and Kumasi, have remained a marked feature of Ghana’s urban development, and continue to exacerbate the disorderliness and conflicts in the land market as more and more people including traditional leaders seek to cash in or control urban lands (Mintah et al., 2020, 2021; Ehwi, 2020; Kasanga (2003)). Gyamera et al. (2018) suggest that about 57% of all court cases in Ghana are land related. Land dispute adjudication in Ghana tends to be protracted–it takes an average of 10–20 years for the courts to settle such cases (Gyamera et al., 2018; Mintah et al., 2021). The result of this is that several parcels of lands in the country remain unavailable to be used to support the supply of housing to meet the rising demand in the cities.

Continuing Disinvestment in Low-Cost Local Building Inputs and Technology

Despite the rhetoric around uprooting all vestiges of colonialism and imperialism from the continent, at independence, most post-colonial African elites inherited and vigorously continued to enforce exclusionary colonial urban development and planning models (Njoh, 1997, 2002, 2003; Obeng-Odoom, 2015; Moullier, 2015). In the housing sector, these colonial development and planning models insisted on high mandatory minimum plot sizes and depicted indigenous building resources including mud, bricks and bamboo as substandard and, hence, proscribed their use in urban areas. Obeng-Odoom (2013: 111) argues that Ghana was at the ‘polar extreme of this dependence on colonial planning laws and regulations’, a view which the late Kwadwo Konadu-Agyemang detailed as follows:

These [colonial] laws were implemented by bureaucrats, who mystified and bound them in red tape, excluded citizen participation of any kind in the planning process, and imposed on the citizens whatever they have to offer. This continued through to independence in 1957 when the Ghanaian elite took over the administration, and have not only maintained the status quo, but have created a litany of other legislation most of which are based on British models (Konadu-Agyemang, 2001b: 29).

Continued enforcement of the colonial regulations in the post-colonial era encouraged people’s taste towards expensive and exclusive housing standards, feeding into the housing crisis. This is so because high mandatory minimum plot size restriction increases the capital requirement for acquiring lands for housing. Also, houses built to codes that privilege foreign materials are often expensive due to tax components, volatility of exchange rates and inflation (when materials are imported). They come with high production costs even when manufactured locally–the raw materials are imported and other costs such as energy are also usually high.

Like much of Africa (Berrisford, 2011; Watson, 2011), the post-colonial Ghanaian elites have sought to revise some of the colonial settlement and planning regulations to meet their contemporary needs. For instance, in 1960, realizing that the prevailing 1940s regulations were evidently out of date, the then West African Building Research Institute published a loads code to guide the construction of civil engineering structures (GSA, 2018: ii). The Building and Road Research Institute (BRRI) followed up with a draft building code in the 1970s, intended to address the redundancies in the earlier documents. The Institute updated the code in 1977 and 1988 into 5 parts, focused on ‘Administration’ (Part 1); ‘Use & Occupancy’ (Part 2), ‘Structural Loads and Procedures’ (Part 3), ‘Foundations’ (Part 4) and ‘Housing and Small Buildings’ (Part 5).

With changes in land-use patterns, materials, construction methods and local governance, the Ministry of Works and Housing produced the National Building Regulations (LI 1630) in 1996. Between 2011 and 2012, the BRRI, under the auspices of the Ministry of Water Resources, Works and Housing, compiled a Draft Ghana Building Code (2012). In 2017, the Ghana Standards Authority began a process to update the 2012 Draft Code leading to the promulgation of the current Ghana Building Code (2018) (GSA, 2018). The key features of these building regulation and code revisions include repudiating the colonial prohibitions placed on the use of indigenous building materials by creating room for the use of bamboo, brick, mud and other local materials in constructing buildings (National Building Regulations (LI 1630) 1996; Ghana Building Code 2018). The problem, however, is that successive governments are yet to match these relaxed restrictions with the much-needed investment or incentives to support local capacity building and public acceptability of indigenous materials and building technology generally.

The way structural adjustment policies were implemented in the country aptly illustrates how these dynamics play out. As part of efforts towards implementing the policies to serve the ideological needs and interest of international policy transfer lobbyists and agents, instead of local realities and needs, the Government of Ghana liberalized the building material industry, removing tariffs on building materials (Arku, 2009; Boateng, 2019). Liberalization of the building material industry opened the floodgate for the importation of more and more foreign building materials into the country, thereby further entrenching the acquired taste for exotic building inputs. One government-commissioned report suggests that the importation of building materials increased by some 60% (Government of Ghana 1993)–a development that has since remained a marked feature of Ghana’s construction sector (Arku, 2009; GREDA, n.d.). The ongoing advocacy for improved sharper policy focus on investing in local capacity building to improve the safety and other concerns with indigenous materials and building technology and re-orient public taste towards them are yet to be met with any meaningful state response (Agyekum et al., 2020; GREDA, (n.d.)).

It is estimated that some 80% of Ghana’s building materials are imported (Boateng, 2019; GREDA, n.d.), stifling local capacity to improve the quality and public acceptability of the indigenous alternatives, which also tend to be cheaper (Agyekum et al., 2020; GREDA, (n.d.)). Thus, empirical works of Boateng (2019); Danso (2013) and Acheampong et al (2014) suggest low public interest in indigenous building materials and technology generally in Ghana. Many Ghanaians, according to the Ghana Real Estates Development Association (GREDA), consider the use of local materials in building construction as an ‘unenlightened’ practice (GREDA, n.d). Ghana’s situation is not an outlier in what is transpiring on the African continent where builders heavily rely on expensive imported materials instead of cheaper local options (Bah et al., 2018a; Boateng, 2019).

Together, these dynamics inflate the cost of housing provision, playing into the affordable housing crisis. Under conditions of deepening poverty in Africa, this gives currency to the urbanization-heavy argument that the housing crisis persists because incomes are not high enough to support the demand and supply of rental housing that meets normative international standards or the upgrading, and continuing maintenance of existing ones to such standards (Arimah et al., 2011; Tibaijuka, 2007). The evidence from Ghana suggests, however, that the quality affordable housing challenge in Africa lies with the continuing alignment of policies to entrench heavy dependence on expensive foreign building technology and resources, instead of re-orienting public taste and incentives towards the comparatively affordable, low carbon and less heat absorbing indigenous alternatives that are increasingly being advocated by African built environment professionals (GREDA, n.d) and housing activists (Association la Voûte Nubienne (n.d.); The Guardian, 2024).

Rent Exploitation

So far, we have shown how exclusionary housing and land policies; customary land conflicts, the undermining effects of informality on mortgage finance uptake and the continuing disinvestment in low-cost local building technology and resources undermine Ghana’s lower income urban residents’ chances of enjoying decent affordable accommodation and neighborhoods. Nevertheless, it does not seem their plight plays out anywhere more clearly than on the rental housing market. While some 42.1% of Ghanaian households are said to occupy their own dwelling units, some 28% access housing through renting (Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), 2019). The other tenure arrangements are distributed as follows: Rent-free/don’t pay any rents (29.1%); perching² (0.3%); squatting (0.2%) (See Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), 2019: xix).

Rental houses in Ghana are highly segmented according to quality, which correlates with location (the better serviced the location, the higher the cost of rent). For instance, housing practitioners categorize the houses in Accra and Tema into 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th class areas (see Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), 2014:18). Category 4 houses, which also serve most tenants, are usually single rooms and/or chamber and hall units on shared compounds, often sharing common facilities (Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), 2014). However, other housing forms exist that can be categorized as 5th class housing. They are often bereft of basic facilities to support hygiene needs and come in the form of containers, kiosks, wooden and other similar structures and are often scattered in and around the central business districts (Klopp & Paller, 2019; Okyere et al., 2018a; Paller, 2015, 2019). Although rental values for categories 4 and 5 types of housing can be as high as US $70 per month (Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), 2014) and $40 per month (Morrison, 2017)–excluding utility charges, they generally command low rents.

The problem, however, is that Ghanaian landlords/ladies tend to increase rental costs and evict tenants arbitrarily (Arku et al., 2012; Owusu-Ansah et al., 2018). More crucially, they often demand 2–3 years of rent advance payment from potential tenants and continuing tenants who extend their expired leases (Arku et al., 2012; Ehwi, 2020; Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), 2014). Some even demand as high as 5 years advance lump-sum rental payments (Owusu-Ansah et al., 2018) in contravention of the Rent Control Act 220 of 1963 which proscribes landlords from charging more than 6 months of rent advance, and from increasing rents arbitrarily (Sect. 25 (5) of the Rent ACT, 1963: ACT 220). The landlords argue that the advance lump sum rent system is necessary for them to accumulate sufficient liquidity to invest in maintenance and deliver more housing (Arku et al., 2012). The Government has recently established a National Rental Assistance Scheme to help renters and potential renters meet the demands of the landlords. Whether or not the Scheme can help fix the housing crisis remains to be seen. Some recent preliminary reviews suggest, however, that the Scheme risks just legitimizing the illegal lump-sum payment practice without actually addressing the crisis (Ehwi et al., 2021; Morrison et al., 2021).

The housing supply crisis, linked to the continuing alignment of housing and housing related policies with the private gain of a minority, is what has created room for landlords to informally exploit tenants and charge them rent advances more than what the law allows. Nonetheless, chronic disinvestment in rent protections also plays a key role. The point here is that the Rent Control Department (RCD) is unable to do its job effectively in enforcing the Rent Control Act 220. The Department has been chronically underfunded. For instance, it had just 66 staff members in 2009, although it required some 308 members to discharge its duties under the law (Owusu-Ansah et al., 2018; Rent Control Department (RCD), 2010: 20). Overall, the result of the continuing exclusion of the majority low-income class from housing and housing related policies and the chronic disinvestment in rent protections is that tenancy experience in Ghana is burdened with a series of capital payments. These coupled with increasing rental values in the cities (Arku et al., 2012 reported a 180% increase in Accra’s rental values in 2008), have succeeded in excluding many low-income people from the rental housing market.

Those already in the market barely survive since they find it difficult to raise extra lump sums to renew their leases (Asante et al., 2021). Thus, Ghana’s private rental housing sector, generally, commands high rents relative to income, which are seldom reinvested to improve the conditions of the houses, thereby encircling the low-income class in ‘a high-cost, low quality trap’ (Gulyani and Talukdar, 2008: 1924) in poorly serviced neighborhoods where they pay considerably high rents relative to the quality of the houses (Morrison, 2017: 2568). The houses and the places where they concentrate, often called slums, are usually bereft of basic facilities to support hygiene needs (Grant, 2009; Klopp & Paller, 2019). Hygiene and other related challenges, however, are not the only challenges these communities face. There are others including forced evictions and related political violence which, in turn, further undermine the residents’ chances of securing and maintaining access to decent accommodation and neighborhoods. The next section unpacks how these dynamics play out.

Forced Evictions and Related Political Violence

Many slum dwellers live near central business districts because of the chronic underinvestment in public transport and the use of minibuses (trotros) or other means is often too expensive for them, forcing them to live in suboptimal rental housing near work to save on transport (Campbell et al., 2018). The government is making some gestures towards non-punitive policies to improve communities. These include the establishment of a Ministry for Inner City and Zongo³ Development and the ongoing efforts towards strengthening the Local Government Act 1993 and the National Development Planning Act, 1994 with the view to paving way for slum upgrading, among other key more inclusive steps (Agyabeng & Preko, 2021; Government of Ghana, 2015). Nevertheless, for a long time, the state’s demeanor towards these low-income populations–particularly those with residences close to the central business districts where most of them also eke out a living–has been largely hostile and marked by recurrent displacement policies including often inadequate consultative relocations, forced evictions and related political violence (Azunre & Boateng, 2023; Boateng, 2022a; Gillespie, 2016, 2017; Obeng-Odoom, 2011, 2015).

A chilling case in point is when the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) decided to destroy the homes of some 1,000 workers in the informal sector because they were deemed ‘illegal’–at a time the Government had unleashed the brute force of its law enforcement machinery on people for allegedly violating COVID-19 ‘stay at home’ restrictions (Boateng, 2021b; 2022b; Cromwell, 2020). Similar exercises have been carried out recently including the widely popularized ‘Let’s Make Accra Work’ initiative (Citi Newsroom, 2023). Echoing their colonial predecessors, the authorities usually justify the attacks, often communicated as ‘slum clearance’, ‘decongestion exercises’, and ‘demolition of illegal structures’, on grounds that the livelihood activities of the people generate congestion, urban aesthetic decay, crime and most importantly violate urban planning and land-use regulations (Obeng-Odoom, 2011; Bob-Millar & Obeng-Odoom, 2011; Boateng et al., 2022c; Boateng, 2022d).

Ehwi (2020) and Fält (2019) show, however, that similar violations by powerful people and real estate companies do not elicit similar violent attacks from the authorities. This gives impetus to the suggestion that the authorities employ the ‘illegality’ discourses just to veil their use of the state to ‘discipline’ opposition-voting constituencies (Bob-Millar & Obeng-Odoom, 2011) and to facilitate private capital accumulation by enclosing urban commons and evicting the poor to free up public spaces for exclusive, high-end projects including housing for wealthier residents (Gillespie, 2016, 2018) as has been seen in other parts of the continent (Kimani et al., 2021; Klopp, 2008). Regardless of the authorities’ intentions, victim accounts of evictions documented by human rights organizations (Amnesty International, 2011) media (Cromwell, 2020) and researchers (Obeng-Odoom, 2011) show that such attacks tend to destroy the savings, houses and other physical and non-physical assets the poor accumulate over many years of precarious work and in doing so, often reduce them to survivalism.

Victims of evictions usually build back their businesses, homes and communities on the many occasions the authorities have destroyed them (Bob-Millar & Obeng-Odoom, 2011; Obeng-Odoom, 2011). However, being caught in a vicious cycle of having to begin life afresh each time the authorities destroy businesses, houses and other assets impedes these residents from accumulating the required wherewithal to secure or maintain access to decent housing in a market skewed against them; they also face serious trauma and hence physical and psychological stress and damage to their health which can also entail more costs (Harrisberg, 2019; Klopp & Paller, 2019; Mohindra & Schrecker, 2013).

Discussion and Conclusions

With rapid urbanization, the shortage of decent, affordable housing in well serviced neighborhoods has undoubtedly been exacerbated in Africa. However, to understand how to address this problem requires going beyond the ‘anti-politics machine’ discourse that approaches the complex housing problem in African cities as simply resulting from abstract processes of urbanization undermining effective supply and demand. In this paper, we have shown that a critical postcolonial institutional approach that unpacks power and historically produced institutional dynamics around housing provides more insight into the way policies and practices continue to actively exacerbate inequalities in housing access and quality.

We bring all the different processes together in one framework represented in Fig. 1 below. In the center we show five different categories of housing injustice we have isolated. These include inadequate supply and quality of housing which tends to be the focus of urbanization framed housing policy along with other dimensions that are often neglected including poor service provision, high, often extortionary rents, violence and tenure insecurity. This diagram highlights multiple mechanisms and processes that feed into multi-faceted housing injustice. It is these processes that the ‘anti-politics machine’ more abstracted urbanization-heavy approach tends to obscure or inadequately consider.

Fig. 1

Web of elite capture and urban housing injustices in Ghana

The critical postcolonial institutional analyses we advance from Ghana problematize housing injustices in the light of the continuing historical, local and externally financed regressive policies shaping access to land, housing finance and ultimately housing and urban governance, as opposed to the size and socio-economic characteristics of the country’s urban population. In this sense, this work shares the analytical arc canvassed by Sean Fox in The Political Economy of Slums (Fox, 2014). Fox (2014: 191) considers ‘the proliferation of slum settlements in Africa [a]s de facto evidence of persistent government failure to invest in urban development and cultivate effective institutions for urban management’. Our findings, suggest, however, that this requires unpacking; it is perhaps more precise to say that this ‘government failure’ in investment that might redress inequalities in housing is, in fact, often linked to wider patterns of regressive policies around housing that are shaped by political economy and historical-institutional factors and are, hence, deeply entrenched and path dependent: in line with Ferguson’s analysis in The Anti-Politics Machine (1994), the ‘failure’ of housing policy works to the benefit of some powerful groups.

In effect, grossly underserved neighborhoods in Ghana’s and other similarly situated African cities reflect failure to redress colonial land and housing inequalities and persisting inadequate investment in services and housing over time. In continuity with colonial times, such neighborhoods are characterized as temporary or ‘informal’ settlements which helps undermine the legitimacy of claims to these services in the policy sphere (Klopp & Paller, 2019; Morrison, 2017). Framing the problem this way reveals the power structures and institutions that create policies and conditions that work against equitable access to finance, land, and housing and legal protections to space and fair rents and, hence, against a just distribution of land, finance, housing and urban investments generally, which the urbanization-driven supply–demand narrative obscures. These power dynamics are, however, not the only critical influences of the housing failure that the urbanization-heavy approach conceals. There are others, including the circular and cumulative causation dynamics of housing injustices in African cities.

Circular and Cumulative Causation Dynamics of Housing Injustices in African Cities

As shown in Fig. 1, the housing injustices create other forms of injustices, which in turn seep back into housing injustices, making it difficult for the entrapped people and communities to get out of the situation. For instance, the diagram and the analyses provided show that the marginalized communities and low-income people suffering housing injustices in the form of being pushed into poorly serviced parts of the cities, inundated with unregistered houses and structures often built by unlicensed constructors are excluded from the mortgage market. The problem has roots in Ghana’s mortgage service providers’ unsurprising emphasis on titled properties constructed by licensed/formal/certified built environment professionals in well-serviced economically viable locations (Boamah, 2014; Teye et al., 2015; Obeng-Odoom, 2013; Arku, 2009). Research suggests that the housing finance market operates in similar ways in other parts of Africa (Bah et al., 2018b), benefiting a privileged minority.

The result in Ghana is that it makes millions of people and properties–particularly those in informal settlements–ineligible for mortgage to improve the poor conditions of housing and the neighborhoods, contributing to urban problems. This, in turn, in keeping with trends in other African cities (Kamete, 2013; Kimani et al., 2021; Ocheje, 2007), creates room for the authorities to weaponize urban regeneration interventions to evict the communities, destroying the savings, houses and other physical and non-physical assets they accumulate over many years. Together, these self-reinforcing dynamics undermine the ability of most urban dwellers–particularly of the low-income class– to accumulate the required resources for securing or maintaining access to decent housing and neighborhoods and this feeds back into the housing injustices. The urbanization-heavy approach neglects questions about these vicious circular and cumulative causation dynamics of urban housing injustices and the underlying elite capture and resistance to change which we detail below.

Elite Capture and Resistance to Change

The critical postcolonial institutional approach we advance also sheds light on the pattern of fragmented and disjointed policymaking around housing in Ghana, marked by corruption and frequent abandonment of public housing projects, poor prioritization and continuing disinvestment in developing, completing and implementing equity-oriented housing policies. This suggests elite resistance to attempts to undo legacies of elite capture and exclusion, a phenomenon which is also extensively documented in other African cities (Fox, 2014; Klopp, 2000, Mitlin, 2022). Exclusive historical processes generate path dependencies that help explain the persistence of the regressive policymaking and practices we have reviewed despite the clear overt rationale to change them. Path dependency is linked to the accumulated effects of historical institutional and political dynamics. In this case highly exclusionary and regressive policies were the very foundation of the colonial state which set in motion a self-reinforcing process where exclusionary policies provided an accrual of benefits–both resources and power–to state and traditional elites and their networks in society who control housing and housing-related institutions including land in the post-colonial state.

As Levi notes in her discussion of path dependency “there will be other choice points, but the entrenchments of certain institutional arrangements obstruct an easy reversal of the initial choice’ (Levi, 1997: 28) as we are seeing in the frequent abandonment of public housing projects, poor prioritization and continuing disinvestment in developing, completing and implementing equity-oriented housing policies in Ghana. A first step in addressing these legacies and their present-day effects is to understand them in more detail and more holistically as we have tried to do here. We must continue to dissect the detailed dynamics and ways that multi-dimensional exclusion and bias against the poor operate and have been institutionalized in policy and practice to produce the housing crisis over longer time scales and then develop strong, specific counter-policies to redress these biases. As a beginning point, it is important to challenge policy narratives that depoliticize housing problems and instead, show clearly how the housing crisis on the continent emerges not out of urbanization processes per se, but the constellation of regressive policies and practices that continue to align housing and housing-related resources to the needs of a few through cronyism, predatory rent extraction, exclusionary housing and housing finance schemes, land speculation, and high-end real estate deals or state-subsidized expensive and exclusive housing.

Approaching the great human suffering we call housing or slum crisis in African cities in this way helps pinpoint alternative policies that are more likely to produce livable housing and neighborhoods for all. While these will not be easy to implement given the dynamics of entrenched interests, it is important to explore them in more detail and encourage greater public discussion and awareness of the profound injustices perpetrated by the status quo. Specifically, some of the alternative policies to explore in Ghana and across the continent in order to more comprehensively address housing injustice include: 1) moratoriums on evictions if no housing is in fact available for just compensation as well as recognition of low-income neighborhoods, not as “informal”, but as special planning areas (Ouma, 2023) 2) expanded services for poor neighborhoods including more bottom-up slum upgrading that is thoughtful about the diverse needs of residents and avoids gentrification and exclusion (Gulyani & Bassett, 2007; Huchzermeyer, 2008; Rigon, 2022). In Ghana slum upgrading is mentioned in the 2015 Housing policy and more recently in the Ministry for Inner City and Zongo Development’s Medium Term Expenditure Framework for 2019–2022 (Ministry of Finance, 2018: 1). In practice, however, few upgrading projects–particularly in situ ones–occur. Displacing low income, poorly served neighborhoods and “informal” settlements generally, often with inadequate consultative relocations, forced evictions and related political violence, remain a critical government policy focus as evidenced by the recently suspended ‘Let’s Make Accra Work’ initiative (Citi Newsroom, 2023). There is great potential for more investment in these low-income communities. The government mentions a draft Slum Upgrading and Prevention Strategy (Ghanaweb, 2022a) but as of writing this article, this appeared inaccessible. It would be important for the government to release and finalize an inclusive upgrading strategy 3) investing in low-cost low carbon and less heat absorbing indigenous building resources to reduce dependence on expensive exotic alternatives, and, hence, the cost of housing while ensuring safety; This will become more critical as a way also, to address housing resilience in the face of climate change impacts (Gambo, 2023); 4) progressive property and land taxes to finance affordable housing; 5) inclusionary zoning that allows different economic mixes as well as mixed use in neighborhoods for great inclusion and 6) improved and more transparent delivery of land and finance for transit oriented affordable public and rental housing. Once we start looking deeper into housing injustice or crisis, the good news is that multiple pathways emerge to challenge elite capture and multi-dimensional exclusionary practices and to push for more and better housing and neighborhoods for all.