Planner: Half the population could live in urban areas by 2010

Accra, Sept. 15, GNA - The urban area constitutes less than one per cent of the country's human settlement, yet it accommodates 44 per cent of the population.

Should the trend continue, half of the population would live in the urban areas by 2010, Mr. Lawrence Dakurah, Deputy Director of the Town and County Planning Department (TCPD), cautioned on Monday. He gave the warning at a two-day Zonal Human Settlements Policy Workshop in Accra to afford stakeholders the opportunity to make inputs in the draft policy.

The outcome of the workshop would also help in the development of a framework that would establish a new system of spatial and land use planning and management for the country, under the Land Use Planning and Management Project (LUPMUP).

Mr Dakurah said due to the congestion in urban areas and its constraint on infrastructure and social amenities, there was an urgent need for a policy to correct the geographical imbalance. He noted that the situation had contributed to pressure on urban lands, increasing their price values as well as the invasion of agriculture fertile land.

This, he said, had also led to the merging of settlements, which had made it difficult to mark out exact demarcations, citing Kasoa as an example, which was considered more within Greater Accra instead of the Central region.

Mr Dakurah expressed the hope that when the policy was developed it would help manage the trend of urbanisation and mitigate its associated factors that retarded development. Presenting a paper on Attitudes to Human Settlements in Ghana, Dr Robin Bloch, Consultant for LUPMP, said the country's urban growth rate stood at three per cent annually. He said the number of urban localities had also increased vastly from 98 in 1960 to over 400 currently, adding that Greater Accra alone accounted for a third of the urban population. Dr Bloch indicated that poverty levels were very high within Greater Accra, despite reduction in national figures. From 1998 to 2006, he said, poverty rate in Greater Accra rose from four per cent to 11 per cent.

He therefore called for effective urban management and planning in order not to weaken the economies derived from urban setting. Mr Ben Doe, Deputy Project Manager of LUPMP, explained that LUPMP was a sub-component of the Land Administration Project aimed at enhancing the institutional, legal and technology capacity of the TCPD. He said the workshop was the third and final series organised for land sector agencies to help improve effectiveness and efficiency of land use planning and management. Mr Doe said the project was currently building the capacity of staff of the TCPD in information technology to them embrace the task ahead.