Disregard for Women in Urban Planning Exercises in Accra

     

Over half of Accra's population are migrants who travel from other parts of the country to the city in search of a better livelihood and to make ends meet (Abrokwah, 2013). For decades, the city has been swelled up by rural-urban and urban-urban migration due to underdevelopment of Ghana’s rural areas and the high concentration of opportunities and industries in the cities (Steel, Ujoranyi & Owusu, 2014). This can be attributed to the legacy of the colonial economy that has aggravated since the 1980s after Ghana chose a neoliberal structural project directed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (Yeboah et al., 2013). The proliferation of migrant settlements in Accra can be ascribed to the highly unequal urban geography and the exclusion of other cities from formal housing markets (Obeng-Odoom, 2013b). According to Owusu (2012), the persistent inept planning regulations and weak state capacity during the colonial epoch encouraged unplanned informal development. For some years now, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) has responded aggressively to the informal settlements by introducing decongestion exercises to evict squatters and street traders to transform Accra into a modern and millennium city. 

The exercise, headed by the Regular Coordinating Council (RCC) with the support of security agencies (the military and police) and the government, began from the central business district where squatters were ousted immediately. The approaches and practices applied in decongestion and urbanization policies have done no good in terms of sustainable development due to the exclusion of and disregard for women in the process. Men are mostly at the forefront of the exercise, whereas most victims are women workers. The bulldozing strategy has been used in Accra to accomplish the decongestion policy, in which residents of slums and anyone employed in the informal economy, particularly street vendors, are treated with violence and impulsivity. Disposing of the informal proletariat is a strategy that significantly offends proponents of the right to the city since it implies, both explicitly and implicitly, that some groups of city workers have no place or livelihood in Accra. All people are negatively affected by forced evictions, but women are frequently disproportionately affected and must put up with the harshest abuse. This is because women frequently occupy a unique position in Ghana's historical informal economy (Crentsil & Owusu, 2018).

    Owusu and Lund (2004) claim that although Ghanaian women have long engaged in informal trading, the effects of economic reform programs beginning in the mid-1980s have pushed more women into this sector, either as the household's sole breadwinners or as supplementers of incomes in the face of rising prices for essential needs, growing unemployment and underemployment of male partners, declining real incomes, and the growing need to pay local taxes. The decongestion policy in Accra has been tantamount to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, particularly when carried out with violence or with discriminatory intent especially, on women. During forced evictions, women are frequently harassed or beaten and occasionally subjected to inhumane treatment.

References

Abrokwah, S., (2013). Decongesting the Streets of Accra: The Problems and Prospects, unpublished MPhil dissertation (Accra: University of Ghana)

Crentsil, A. O. & Owusu, G., (2018). Accra’s Decongestion Policy: Another Face of Urban Clearance  or  Bulldozing Approach? In C. Ammann & T. Förster (Eds.), African Cities and the Development  Conundrum 10, 213–228. Brill. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctvbqs4gq.16 

Obeng-Odoom F., (2013b). Regeneration for some; degeneration for others. In Leary M and McCarthy J eds The Routledge companion to urban regeneration Routledge, London 189–98        

Owusu, G., (2012). Coping with urban sprawl: A critical discussion of the urban containment strategy in a developing country city, Accra. Planum, 26, 1–17

Owusu, G. and R. Lund (2004) ‘Markets and Women’s Trade: Exploring their Role in District Development in Ghana’, Norwegian Journal of Geography, 58(3), pp. 113-124, DOI: 10.1080/00291950410002313.

 Steel W, Ujoranyi T, & Owusu G., (2014). Why evictions do not deter street traders: Case study in Accra, Ghana. Ghana Social Science Journal 11(2), 52-76.

Yeboah, E. A., Codjoe, S. N., & Maingi, J. K., (2013). Emerging urban system demographic trends: Informing Ghana’s national urban policy and lessons for Sub-Saharan Africa. Africa Today, 80(1), 98–124.