An Assessment of the National Policy on Street Naming In Greater Accra

Abstract

Street naming has been a practice in Ghana since the colonial era. The Government in the year 2012 partnered the World Bank to name all streets in Ghana. After five years of implementation, the study seeks to examine whether the policy had been effective in meeting its set objectives. A Mixed method approach was employed to address the objectives. A survey was conducted to collect the quantitative data while in-depth interviews were used to collect qualitative data. The study was conducted in three assemblies in Greater Accra Region. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the quantitative data while thematic analysis was employed to analyse the qualitative data. It came out of the study that residents of the assemblies were not comfortable with the kind of names used for the streets. Apart from not being popular among the residents, most of the new names were too difficult to mention or memorize. Again, the study revealed that the street naming exercise had not improved emergency services provision and revenue mobilization efforts as it sought to do. A suggestion was therefore made to the Government to involve residents in naming streets in their areas in order to avoid the use of strange and difficult names. Again, emergency service providers and revenue mobilization officials should be educated on the new street names to enhance their service delivery.