Improving Urban Resilience in Ghana

Executive Summary Accra has experienced rapid population growth over the past two decades, a phenomenon that has presented many challenges. Among the most important are the rise of informality, with the majority of Accra’s citizens employed in the informal economy or living in informal housing.¹ The city also faces a massive strain on its infrastructure; in particular, the transportation system is characterized by poor road conditions and safety hazards. Notably, transportation and informality converge on Accra’s streets, where vendors intercept vehicles at key intersections to sell a wide variety of goods—creating a dynamic ecosystem with its own set of complex concerns and opportunities.

Faced with these and other challenges related to its explosive urbanization, the Accra Metropolitan Authority (AMA) joined the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) Initiative in 2014. Under this umbrella, it undertook extensive stakeholder participation exercises to identify critical physical, social, and economic stresses and develop remedies to address them. In so doing, the AMA articulated five goals to bolster the city’s resilience. Among them were two related to the transportation and informality issues discussed above: 1. Strengthen urban mobility and transportation; and 2. Recognize, embrace, and support the informal sector.

Seeking assistance in delineating policies to pursue these two goals, 100RC, represented

by Jeb Brugmann, Vice President of Solutions Development & Innovation, commissioned a team of students at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (WWS) to undertake a pilot study of vendor/vehicular behavior at two critical intersections: Wato Junction, located at the city’s historic center, and Cathedral Junction, a thoroughfare at the crux of some of the city’s important health and cultural institutions. The WWS study objective was three-fold: i) to research and analyze traffic and pedestrian flows as well as informal livelihoods activities at the two intersections, ii) to participate in and contribute to a 100RC multi-stakeholder workshop on generating improvement concepts for the two intersections with preliminary findings as inputs, and iii) to provide the final findings and recommendations on policies and institutional development measures that could facilitate the implementation of AMA resilience strategy to 100RC. Under the direction of visiting professor Eugenie Birch and visiting lecturers Chandan Deuskar and Kimberly Noronha from the University of Pennsylvania, the WWS team conducted research at Princeton prior to carrying out a week-long field study in the two intersections and their surroundings. (See WWS, Topics on Informality in Ghana, 2019).

During this field research, the team mapped traffic flows and documented vendor and driver behaviors, as well as analyzed the spatial features of each location. The team also participated in a 100RC-sponsored Co-Lab, a daylong stakeholder workshop, to gain a better understanding of the policy environment related to urban design, transportation, and planning in the city and to solicit ideas regarding the infrastructural and livelihood challenges identified at each site.

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